Being There

Novem­ber 1st, first day of National Novel Writ­ing Month (or should that be Inter­na­tional).  In the spirit of the month, I will ende­vour to write a post every day. Let’s hope this doesn’t kill me!

This week: lots more craziness, including a con­fer­ence I orga­nized, two new port­fo­lios (2!), and a trip to New York. That’s the Big Apple, we’re not talkin’ Syra­cuse here. Not that I have any­thing against Syra­cuse, I once heard some wicked-awesome jazz clar­inet there.

Edit­ing down to a new port­fo­lio is a tough process. It requires a lot of self-knowledge and intro­spec­tion. At least it does when I do it. Its always a lit­tle bit nerve-wracking, but fun in the end. I use a trick I learned a long time ago (but was reminded by Don Weber of how impor­tant it is): I print out every photo I think has a shot at mak­ing it to the final edit. Even some odd­ball ones, pho­tos where you think “what was I get­ting at here”, or pho­tos you think don’t belong with any oth­ers. I print them all out, and lay the proofs on a big table. Then I push them around. I sit some by oth­ers, I make lit­tle col­lec­tions, remove a few. As every­thing slides around the table I start to see con­nec­tions, rela­tion­ships between the ideas. That’s how a story comes together.

I’m always try­ing to under­stand what my pho­tos mean, beyond the mere con­ceit of the image. Look­ing back over the thou­sands and thou­sands of pho­tos I’ve shot over the last eight yeasrs, I’m start­ing to see some trends. Most of the time, my pho­tos are about bound­aries. No sur­prise there, I’ve been strug­gling my whole life to over­come iso­la­tion, abuse, and poverty.

I used to focus on the exter­nal world. My pho­tos were acces­si­ble, they employed easy metaphors that related to con­crete lim­i­ta­tions. I pho­tographed things like fences and birds to illus­trate my desire to break free. Then I started to look at inter­nal lim­i­ta­tions. For a long time I used blurry, foggy, murky pho­tos to exer­cise my ghosts. On my vaca­tions I went to places where peo­ple had been trapped: Granada and Sara­jevo. I think I’ve finally got­ten rid of most of those ghosts. Lately I’ve been think­ing about inter­per­sonal bound­aries. Poverty is essen­tially an issue of social restric­tion (based on iden­tity), so I’ve been tak­ing pic­tures of peo­ple. My pic­tures of peo­ple are the most explicit of the pho­tos I’m mak­ing now. I’d strug­gled to pho­to­graph peo­ple for a long time, but I think I’m finally start­ing to find my groove.

In all of this, it is my desire to make dark places acces­si­ble. I want any­one look­ing at my pho­tos to under­stand what it feels like to long to be free, to feel haunted, or to be iso­lated. I want to sug­gest ways out of dark­ness, and to give hope.