Telling Truth With A Camera

Knowledge is a personal high.

When you’ve spent days or weeks circling around the essence of a story or a concept, like an osprey hovering over a school of mackerel…. At the moment of impact, when a concept gels into a plan, or the camera captures that classic Cartier-Bresson Moment, when the hunter snags a fish in her beak, there’s a chemical explosion in the soul that becomes addicting.

Participants in MPW64 in Troy, Missouri didn’t have days to figure things out. They needed to come up with their story ideas in half a day; then go back out and try again if those ideas didn’t have the potential for immersion and fruition. This wasn’t going to be a cake walk; not an opportunity to hobnob and add a line to their resume. There was going to be growth, and that meant growing pains.

 Never mind anyone’s jet lag, or the increasingly inclement weather, or the fact we couldn’t eat or drink in the compound we’d secured from the city: a former church, complete with pews.

For the returning faculty, seasoned editors and photographers from around the country, and the crew, largely graduate students from the University of Missouri’s School of Photojournalism, this was our Big Chill week. Some of us only see each other once a year, at the Missouri Photo Workshop. We can recite the narrative to Jim Richardson’s Cuba, Kansas documentary project by heart, and never tire of seeing the pictures again. Richardson’s classic photos of small town America, and tributes to photojournalism emissaries like Cliff and Vi Edom, remind us it is ever-more critical to teach the tenets of “Telling Truth With a Camera.” 

We come to choreograph the dance of enthusiasm on a blind date with opportunity. 

In Troy, over the course of a week, cowboys and prom queens are once again immortalized. Unsung heroes have their songs finally scripted, grandparents filling in as parents are lauded, veterans are recognized for their service once again and hyperactive families exhaust even the most energetic photographers.

Roundabout day four, when the duct tape failed to curtail the weight of the black curtain separating us from a crisp autumn day, I momentarily escaped into a pasture of green grass across the street from our compound. Following a slow creek along the park, I discovered some alien seedpods still clinging to downed vines behind American Barbeque. I managed a few photographs of the weightless seeds before they were swept away on the chilly breeze.

The beautiful rust-colored shells were like birds of paradise with a green trim and white parasolled pods waiting for a lift.

Deeper into the park behind me, between tall trees, as the sun danced through leaves, a man kneeled, searching the grass, dropping handfuls of something into a broken dustpan. Farmer Ben was collecting Swamp Oak acorns.

  Hadn’t I seen acorns before? (Must be a city girl).
Farmer Ben knew all about my mystery pod and seed ensemble: milkweed. When he was a child in elementary school, at the time of the war, the students were dispatched to the fields to collect milkweed seed pods because there was a shortage of cotton. Their burlap sacks of milkweed pods were shipped to factories and used in the making of jackets and blankets for soldiers abroad. 

Seventy years later, Farmer Ben was still collecting what trees cast off, selling his acorn harvest to a seed broker in another town who marketed them by the ton.

Back at editing headquarters, participants were showing signs of fraying. The crew was wrapped in blankets and living off peanut butter from the jar. Stories weren’t as photogenic as the photographers had thought they would be. The townspeople weren’t as receptive on day two, or three, as they were on the first day, being shadowed by a photographer. Their unkempt living rooms or less-than-perfect habits were harder to conceal now. Truth With a Camera.

Shooters were learning real people skills, or coming to terms with lazy exposure and composition habits. Editors who spent all day looking at images, weren't shy about passing along harsh truths. Veteran workshop organizers David Rees, Jim Curley and Duane Dailey have tailored the pace of the workshop, themed the presentations and organized the makeup of the teams for maximum growing pain (and pleasure in the outcome). Everyone survives mostly intact, but only a handful find this new dance magical. The majority will take their experiences home, wrapped in dirty laundry and legendary workshop fatigue. Their “Aha!” moments will appear at another time.

 

Stepping outside of one’s self far enough to step inside someone else’s world, then telling that someone else’s story is a zen process of letting go. More Truth With a Camera. Followed by late night unwinding sessions under the watchful gaze of Fred the Head.

Participants are shoved out of their comfort zones. Heading into the unknown; we only learn when we take risks. For me, giving a presentation is out of my comfort zone. Many of us are braver in dangerous confrontations on the job than at a podium explaining ourselves.

It's worth the squirming and  sweaty palms before/during a presentation to arrive at the day we sit with participants going over their final edits together. My faculty partner Rick Shaw, the venerable Director of the POYi competition, and I have coaxed some risk-taking and nuances in seeing from most of our shooters by now.

They have preciously guarded 400 total frames over four days and we arrive at the moment we whittle their story down to eight, maybe 12. This is magic for all of us. Editing is another means of storytelling; and herein we respect the photographer’s vision for their story, while also showing how to approach their next story, when they watch us pairing images into a narrative.

A faculty tradition at MPW is the brief escape of faculty into the town we have only experienced thus far in pictures. We descend like a swarm of wasps on consignment shops in search of relevant gifts for the MPW crew. Discovering what once-coveted items have been since relinquished by the denizen of Troy made us smile. Randy Cox got to reveal more of his spontaneous self. We all really missed Melissa Farlow to guide us in this and so many other things.

There were bobblehead George W. Bush and John Kerry dolls, a Masonic fez cap, record collections, a variety of fishing knives, tools, porcelain figurines and a discounted painting of Jesus.

Being on our own to search for food that day landed us at a Sonic. There is no inside to a Sonic, at least not for customers. You either park and order at an intercom, or get out of your car, walk twenty feet to a patio with tables and speak your order through an intercom to a person inside just thirty feet away. Hmmm. The locals were highly entertained by our utter confusion in this system of commerce. Well fortified with the power of burgers, onion rings and limeade slushies, we returned to the Mother Ship with our treasures to settle in for the evening's show, the results of our collective week-long efforts. As the work played on a big screen we could hear people breathe normally for the first time in a week. 

The biggest treat is the townsfolk coming to see the prints displayed at the local high school.

Workshop participants and faculty finally meets the subjects we know only through stories.

And then it’s over, but not really. Everyone leaves MPW seeing the world with fresh eyes, including the faculty. More and more it's an experience that doesn't happen at the workplace for photographers these days. It keeps us all coming back.

The amazing crew is constructing a look at everyone's photo stories at http://www.mophotoworkshop.org/.