Choosing projects
Yesterday, I posted a few pictures from a project I’ve been thinking about for a few months: a series of portraits of kids with their babysitters. Melissa Lyttle commented and said, “But why?” Good question.
The idea for the project came to me in the car with S. (where most ideas come to me). We’d been listening to This American Life (Episode #351: “Return to Childhood 2008”), and in the first segment of the show, Alex Bloomberg tries to track down Susan Jordan, who babysat Alex and his sister when Alex was nine years old. Here’s the bit that grabbed me:
The years when you babysit are tumultuous ones. Everything is drama. Feelings are extreme. And you bring that into the lives of the younger kids who you’re charged with watching. If a teenager babysits for one family more than a few times, the kids usually feel a connection to her. And she tells them things she might never tell her parents or her peers. Teenagers think kids don’t listen, or don’t understand. But kids are like sponges, especially when this exotic creature called a teenager comes into the house.
I like the idea of trying to look for that connection in a series of portraits. As I said in my response to Melissa, I’m just getting started in this, and I’m not sure whether it’ll go anywhere. But I usually have to try things to see if they’ll work. Maybe the portraits alone won’t do it. Maybe I would need to incorporate words or kids’ drawings. Or maybe I’d need to change it up and, instead of doing more formal portraits, take more candid shots (the way I did with my sister’s wedding). I don’t know yet, but I like posting things that are in progress, not fully formed or defined, because I think there’s something to be gleaned there about the process.
Rob Haggart posted today about the importance of choosing a subject. He quotes from a Guardian article in which Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of The New Yorker, talking about photographer Pieter Hugo, says, “Some people have said to me that Pieter’s subject is so dramatic that it would be hard to take a bad picture . . . but, you know, a photographer chooses his subjects, and that, too, is an important part of having a great eye. Photographers go where their instinct leads them and then try and work out their fascination for the subject through the photographs they take.”
What we don’t often see are the starts and stops, the missteps, the things that don’t go anywhere. I work out what I think by writing. I work out what I feel by photographing. I don’t know yet what I feel about this subject, or whether the depth of my feeling will be substantial enough to take me anywhere. But I’m interested enough to try.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking a lot about my In Store series, about why it doesn’t work for me, why it’s stalled. I think there are two key reasons. One of them is that the idea occurred to me as a concept, a theme, something I could get my hands around. I do think the proliferation of storage facilities says something about our culture. And I think it’s an interesting story. But I have no connection to storage facilities myself. I don’t have stuff in storage. I have a tiny apartment and comparatively little stuff.
This is not to say that all photographers must have a personal connection to their subjects in order to make great photos. It’s just that I think I’m at my best—in writing, in photography—when I make it personal. If I’m not feeling anything, something’s wrong.
The idea for the project came to me in the car with S. (where most ideas come to me). We’d been listening to This American Life (Episode #351: “Return to Childhood 2008”), and in the first segment of the show, Alex Bloomberg tries to track down Susan Jordan, who babysat Alex and his sister when Alex was nine years old. Here’s the bit that grabbed me:
These are the things that I remember about Susan Jordan. . . . Me and Susan flipping through one of those Time-Life books: Rock ’n’ Roll through the Decades: The Sixties. She has long, brown hair. She’s incredibly skinny. It’s 1975. She’s wearing bell-bottom Levis, a faded jean jacket. She points to a picture of a bloated man in a powder-blue rhinestone jumpsuit, sitting cross-legged on a stage, before a crowd of crying women. “That’s my favorite picture of Elvis,” she says. This information seems somehow personal, and important.This transported me back to the seventies and eighties, back to super-skinny Debby Jones standing in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom, wearing a bikini, pinching herself, and saying, “Don’t I look fat?” Lisa Piaskowski, who had a crush on the cousin of one of our neighbors, and who gave us a love note to run over and put on his windshield when he was at our neighbors’ house. Suzie Dragoo, sitting on the deck, with the phone cord stretched from the wall in the kitchen, crying to one of her friends about a boy.
The years when you babysit are tumultuous ones. Everything is drama. Feelings are extreme. And you bring that into the lives of the younger kids who you’re charged with watching. If a teenager babysits for one family more than a few times, the kids usually feel a connection to her. And she tells them things she might never tell her parents or her peers. Teenagers think kids don’t listen, or don’t understand. But kids are like sponges, especially when this exotic creature called a teenager comes into the house.
I like the idea of trying to look for that connection in a series of portraits. As I said in my response to Melissa, I’m just getting started in this, and I’m not sure whether it’ll go anywhere. But I usually have to try things to see if they’ll work. Maybe the portraits alone won’t do it. Maybe I would need to incorporate words or kids’ drawings. Or maybe I’d need to change it up and, instead of doing more formal portraits, take more candid shots (the way I did with my sister’s wedding). I don’t know yet, but I like posting things that are in progress, not fully formed or defined, because I think there’s something to be gleaned there about the process.
Rob Haggart posted today about the importance of choosing a subject. He quotes from a Guardian article in which Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of The New Yorker, talking about photographer Pieter Hugo, says, “Some people have said to me that Pieter’s subject is so dramatic that it would be hard to take a bad picture . . . but, you know, a photographer chooses his subjects, and that, too, is an important part of having a great eye. Photographers go where their instinct leads them and then try and work out their fascination for the subject through the photographs they take.”
What we don’t often see are the starts and stops, the missteps, the things that don’t go anywhere. I work out what I think by writing. I work out what I feel by photographing. I don’t know yet what I feel about this subject, or whether the depth of my feeling will be substantial enough to take me anywhere. But I’m interested enough to try.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking a lot about my In Store series, about why it doesn’t work for me, why it’s stalled. I think there are two key reasons. One of them is that the idea occurred to me as a concept, a theme, something I could get my hands around. I do think the proliferation of storage facilities says something about our culture. And I think it’s an interesting story. But I have no connection to storage facilities myself. I don’t have stuff in storage. I have a tiny apartment and comparatively little stuff.
This is not to say that all photographers must have a personal connection to their subjects in order to make great photos. It’s just that I think I’m at my best—in writing, in photography—when I make it personal. If I’m not feeling anything, something’s wrong.
Labels: A Photo Editor, Alex Bloomberg, magazines, Melissa Lyttle, photographers, Pieter Hugo, radio, S., This American Life
posted by Liz at 9:48 AM
1 comments
