“The heart of the method is this: A clue from one photograph would develop into an idea for another. At times the subject matter suggested a method of working and vice versa. Sometimes I would seek out some specific subject matter with a planned picture in mind, but as I became involved with the subject a very different picture would result. … The best procedure for me to follow is to involve myself completely with a number of problems, then move from one to another, and return to each for the purpose of re-evaluation. This time lapse period was the most important factor in the procedure.”
- Kenneth Josephson in the Encyclopedia of 20th Century Photography, p. 838)
This is a pretty accurate summation of the method I’ve found myself using to work out the Burqa series. Looking through the whole cache of initial pictures I was struck by one with a girl in a burqa looking off to her right with a worried expression on her face. I kept on returning to that photograph. That in itself was the clue.
Then I started thinking about burqhas and what they mean to me and to others. I started doing a bit of research and writing up some notes. The next day I went out specifically trying to shoot women wearing burqas. This will add to a a cache of photos which will accrue the small discoveries and alterations of approach that are inevitable (and welcome!). After that I’ll make a set to publish.
One of the big challenges (as outlined in yesterday’s shooting notes) is how to tell an interesting visual story, which holds interest, and which deepens the understanding of the viewer.
I have a cache of other ideas that came up from reviewing the initial range of pictures that I’ve already taken, and when I need space to breathe I will move on to the other projects and then come back to this one with fresher eyes.
I’ve passed the 3000 photo mark in Dhaka and sat down to see what ideas were captured and may be fruitful to persue. Here’s a rough listing of my notes:
Burqhas. Images from Muslim countries, France outlawing the headscarf. It is so alien to us that we keep our distance, but there are people in there. Set of photos that shows that. It’s the eyes that matter. Osama’s wife on her visit to America was stared at (Steve Coll? Book). I want to bring the viewer closer than they’d ever get themselves.
Portraits from afar. Center of frame. Dense surroundings. There is a controlled distance between the subject and the viewer. The subject has a context, but try to make the context irrelevant, mainly visual. or chaotic.
Physical Effort (effort) - something that is missing these days from our overly mechanised life. What have we come from? Is it better? Men.
Sari’s, colour, history of colour and pigments. Dark skinned yet a cacophony of colour. Really close in detail of sari, should still showing bodies and background. Salwars. Attention.
Death of animals. A constant taking of life. The ritual of it. The final death throes. The kids and adults gathered around. The importance of food, the interest compared to the way we look at, or don’t look at the killing of animals in western cultures.
Beggers/deformed. Something we eradicate or doesn’t belong. But here where there are so many crashes, so many crashes these people must live amongst them. A constant reminder of chance, of the capriciousness of life. The act of begging. The reactions of the givers. Also of difference with the homogenised clothing of the western world. As people get wealthier they get more like us. The poor keep their native dress, they can’t afford western luxuries. They can’t assimilate with modernity and it’s looks. There is a deep historical divide between the poor and the rich. Shoot from below so there is a gigantisism. Invert the perspective that the begger and giver usually agree too. The crazier they look the more sympathy they get.
Religious old men. Beards. Toopees. White dishadashas. Who were these men when they were young. Were they always good? Regal. Contrast with surroundings.
Sleeping in public. There’s a lot of it amongst the poor and homeless who use the street to live in. A culture of sleeping? Such little personal effects? Such little care for the self?
Dressed up poor girls. Marrying early. What opportunities? The class of a person is very obvious. Would I need to be very obvious and have classier girls from Gulshan/Bonani in the same set perhaps?
Kids. Careless abandon vs working, labour, lack of freedom. Inequality through kids. Fat rich kids vs poor fun kids?
Rain. The opression, the freedom, the wealth of it. The disease etc. The overflow. This is in danger of being cliched though. Could work really well with close ups as people who are wet are rare back home.
The labourers and how they work back in the tea gardens. Inequality. My personal history of growing up in the gardens. Always being separated, kept ‘clean’ from others. How communal they are. Take photos of Holi etc., festivals. This idea of community that is so alien for me.
Really close details of people’s heads from the side (or from the front). See DSC6898. Similar to Modern Status. Will it have as much impact without most of the facial features if taken from the side?
“I didn’t want to be told that I was terrific. I had a sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn’t worth doing.”
“I like to put things up around my bed all the time. Pictures of mine that I like, and other things. And I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it, it’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way. I suppose a lot of these observations are bound to be after the fact.
I mean, there’s nothing you can do to yourself to get yourself to work. You can’t make yourself work by putting up something beautiful on the wall. Or by knowing yourself. Very often, knowing yourself isn’t going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes, it’s going to leave you kind of blank. Like here I am, there’s a me, I’ve got a history, I’ve got things which are mysterious to me in the world, and I’ve got things that bug me in the world, but there are moments when all that doesn’t seem to avail.”
Marvin Israel “Each photograph for Diane was an event. And it could be said, although it could be argued, that for Diane the most valuable things wasn’t the photograph itself, the art object, it was the event, the experience. I mean she was absolutely moved by every single event that took place. And she would narrate them, in detail, and she wouldn’t just say I took a photograph of so and so in their home, but it was the going there, the being there, the dialogue that came back and forth, the moments, of even just waiting, of no talk, it was an incredibly personal thing.
And once you, once you become an adventurer, and Diane was really an adventurer, she went places where no one had really gone too, they were scary. And once you’ve become an adventurer, you’re geared to adventure, you seek out further adventure, and your life is really based upon it. And I’ve said the photograph is like her trophy. It’s what she received as a reward for this adventure, just like some guy climbs mount Everest, and he has a flag in his hand. You see him there. Diane has the photograph.”
“I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between action and repose. I don’t mean to make a big deal of it, it was just like an expression of something I didn’t see or wouldn’t have seen.”
“One of the excitements of strobe at one time, was that you were essentially blind at the moment you took the picture. I mean it alters light enormously, and reveals things you don’t see. In fact, that’s what made me really sick of it. I began to miss light as it really is, and now I’m trying to get back to some kind of obscurity, where at least there’s normal obscurity. Lately I’ve been struck by how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. It’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.”
“What’s thrilling to me about what’s called technique, I hate to call it that, because it sounds like something up your sleeve, but, what moves me about it is that it comes from some mysterious, deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff but it comes mainly from some deep choices somebody has made. That take a long time, and keep haunting you.”
“Invention is mostly this subtle, inevitable thing. People get closer to the beauty of their invention. They get narrower and more particular. Invention has a lot to do with a certain kind of light that some people have, with the print quality, and the choice of subject. It’s a million choices you make. It’s luck in a sense. Or even ill luck. Some people hate a kind of complexity, others only want that complexity. But none of that is really intentional. I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. I mean, we’ve all got an identity, you can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away.”
“I think the camera is a kind of nuisance in a way. It’s recalcitrant. It’s determined to do one thing and you may want it to do something else. You have to fuse what you want and what the camera wants. It’s like a horse. Well, that’s a bad comparison because I’m not much of a horse back rider. But I mean, you get to learn what it will do. I’ve worked with a couple of them. One will be terrific in certain situations, or I can make it be terrific. Another will be very dumb. But, sometimes I really like that kind of dumbness. It’ll do, you know. I get a great sense that they are different from me. I don’t feel that total identity with the machine. I mean I can work it fine, although I’m not so great actually. Sometimes, when I’m winding it, it’ll get stuck or something will go wrong, and I start clicking everything and suddenly very often it’s all right again. That’s my feeling about machines. If you sort of look the other way they’ll get fixed, except for certain ones.”
“Very often when you go to photograph, it’s like you’re going for an event, say it’s a beauty contest. You picture it in your mind a little bit, that there’ll be these people who are the judges, and they’ll be choosing the winner from all these contestants. And then you go there and it’s not like that at all. Very often an event happens scattered, and the account of it will look to you in your mind, like it will be straight and photographable but actually one person is over there, and another person is over here, and they don’t get together. Even when you go to do a family, you want to show the whole family, but how often are the mother and father and the two kids all in the same side of the room, unless you tell them to go there?”
“I work from an awkwardness, by that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it I arrange myself.”
