CAUTION: This Essay Contains Cliffhanger
– Susan Sontag
* * *
The Picture-Story
by Jamie Jobb
An avid mountain-climber who grew up in the shadows of Oregon’s Cascade Range, John Lindstrom was a fish-out-of-water in Gainesville Florida where he’d moved in the late-1960s to teach students like me photojournalism at the University of Florida. With the state’s highest elevation at a mere 345 feet above the sea, the Sunshine State offers scant challenge for serious West Coast mountaineers.
John only lasted three years in Gainesville before he and his wife Deanne abandoned Florida’s flatscape and returned home to the familiar topography of the Wild West Coast. John and Deanne were largely responsible for me moving west at that time. Their home was a library of photography books chock full of striking images of The Great American West – something which, at that point in my life, I held only a dim awareness.
My uncles in Ohio had their annual Wyoming hunting trip – that was the extent of my knowledge of that fabled landscape, until I found John’s books full of photos by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Wynn Bullock, Edward Weston, his sons Cole and Brett – the so-called “f64 photographers”. Although they traveled to world taking pictures, these artists were drawn to the crisp light and staggering seaside-landscapes of California’s Big Sur, particularly its northern-most location: Point Lobos, just south of Carmel.
Recently, I was reminded of something John taught us in our photojournalism classes, which involved class discussions about slides he’d selected from famous Magnum photographers and projected for our contemplation as nascent photojournalists.
We talked about the composition, the framing, the light, the shadows. We discussed where it was shot, the background and intention of the professional cameraman who took it. We talked about technique, how to approach subjects in the street. In other words, we discussed everything it took for the photograph to find the photojournalist.
But first, let’s leave John’s lecture and join him for a little mountain adventure.
* * *
“John!” …
I’m hanging, literally at the end of my rope.
Thirteen thousand feet above sea level.
Stuck alone onto the shear southeastern cliff face of Williams Mountain.
We’re in Colorado’s Hunter-Fryingpan Wilderness, just east of Aspen.
My ten fingers grip two small rock outcroppings.
And both my hiking-boots extend far onto two other little ledges.
Stretched spread-eagle against the sheer rock face, I yell up into the sky.
“John!” …
Nobody answers.
wrote “God’s Away on Business”.]
The sky continues, not responding.
“John!” …
Our only communication is rope sign-language.
John tugs the rope wrapped round my chest, politely “asking” me:
“Are you there?”
… another tug from above:
“What’s taking you so long?”
So THIS is mountain climbing?
So much FUN to be hanging on for dear life, by a thread!
* * *
John and Deanne are moving back to the West Coast. But we’re with them in Colorado for the summer on our way out west for the first time. John is teaching a mountaineering survival course at Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. I’ve been in Colorado a couple months at that point and had learned to love these Rocky Mountains. So, of course, when John invites me to go backpacking with his students on a Survival Weekend, I say:
“Sure!”
Once we establish base-camp, John sets out his students in roving teams to fend for themselves on their wild wilderness weekend. They’ll fan out in a large circle around Williams Mountain, while we remain at the center where the survival-school students could find us if needed. Otherwise, they’re on their own. This was summer 1970, so nobody had a cell phone to help them survive.
After they leave, John then turns his attention to our base-camp survival duties: time to teach me rock climbing on a big boulder – perhaps 30 feet tall – hovering over our campsite.
Rock climbing is quite simple: grab onto the rock face with all the grip you got!
Then climb up.
That means both feet and both hands.
suburban-storefront “mountain-climbing” walls.]
Back on the cliff, my eyes look for any small outcrop from the rugged rock face that could support my weight on one of those four points at the edges of my splayed body.
With his experience, John was able to clamber up to the peak with our rope in no time. But this is my first-ever attempt at mountain-climbing and I’m stuck here.
One fact is locked into my mind.
In our base-camp rock-climbing class the day before, John had said to remember one thing: never overextend your reach on a rock wall.
Well, I’m at that uncomfortable point now where I MUST overextend my reach.
Both hands, and both feet. Stretched to their limits.
Only two directions are available to me: up OR down.
At the base of the cliff is a half-mile of rocky rubble extending deep into the valley below – I know because I’m looking right into it. That slope is a 45-degree angle. Falling off the cliff would create too much momentum for my carcass rolling down to the bottom of that dead end.
Don’t look down!
Hung there in mid-air, there’s no close outcrop for either of my hands or feet to easily reach. I’m shaking at the thought of being stuck here forever.
With John at the peak, there’s nobody to assist me right now.
I have to do it. I take a deep breath. I look around.
Stop shaking and do this!
I take another deep breath and overreach for the only available little ledge that can support my effort up the rock face.
It’s a stretch, as they say, but I’m able to reach it.
A couple minutes later, I’m standing at the peak with John.
Wow, what a view!
Of course, at that point in my life I understood the thrill mountaineers find in their sport. Indeed, on our way back down from the peak, it becomes clear that John chose to make this an adventure for me because we could have avoided the rock face completely and just walked up the peak on a ridge with a gentle slope!
I’ve now lived in the Wild West for over half a century, so I remain fond of our mountains. I just don’t want to “climb” any more of them. Also, I should note I retained not a single photograph from that experience. But that doesn’t matter now, I know I can still tell the story in vivid words which “take” their own pictures.
* * *
satellite views southeastern slope of Colorado’s Williams Mountain
to writers, is their only means of artistic expression.
Without an understanding of language, combined with
imagination and intuition, occasional strings of lyrical words
are little more than intermittent accidents.
So are photographs made without understanding
the language of light.”
– Galen Rowell
* * *
While we were in college, magazines were in their heyday. Many young writers and photographers enrolled at Florida’s well-respected journalism school hoped to grab a career-boosting byline or photo-credit in a major national magazine.
BTW, nobody would have thought to call these periodicals “zines” in those days. The internet was three decades into the future and nobody had a clue as to what a dam-busting watershed moment that would be for journalism and personal communication, in general. By-The-Way, nobody would have written “BTW” back then either.
Life and Look were the two major competing weekly photo news-feature magazines at that time. They were able to show more detailed human-interest stories than either Time or Newsweek, the other more text-oriented news magazines of the day.
Each publication took a different approach to visual storytelling. Look Magazine also featured the lush All-American illustrations of Norman Rockwell, who’d gained fame with his weekly Saturday Evening Post covers. Rockwell was a unique picture-storyteller.
Rockwell depicted a very clear story in each of his static pictures – all details visible within the frame of his single illustration for that week. For how meticulously he crafted his frames, see article on Rockwell’s “triple-selfie” pictured above: here.
Life Magazine, in particular, offered photojournalists a unique chance to tell stories a lot like filmmakers – in a logical linear sequence of pictures. Life photographers, like those at National Geographic, emphasized their roving journalistic instincts. They went into raw situations or unfamiliar venues as real journalists following the scent of a story, sniffing out its details. In his look at “Life Classic Photographs: A Personal Interpretation”, author John Loengard puts it this way:
“Journalism does not impose on a photographer the same demands it does on other artists. A writer or a painter when working as a journalist has to count and measure and check the accuracy of each physical fact he reports. The camera does this automatically for the photographer. Journalism extends the photographer’s range of subject without altering his basic working methods, and gives him the opportunity to conduct his business – which is looking – without apology.”
* * *
To Look at Life: “Without Apology”
For the last nine months, I’ve been photographing the slow demolition of a 12-story steel and concrete building down the street from our house. I’ve kept the camera charged and the tripod ready, legs extended out full. So I can just grab the camera bag, grab the ‘pod and get out the door whenever my ears inform me that the high-rise demolition machines are getting active again.
As I covered this on-going event, I recalled mountain-man John Lindstrom’s picture-story lectures. I also recalled the great Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who considered photography an art that seeks “to preserve life in the act of living” because photographers “deal in things which are continually vanishing.”
My Panasonic Lumix GH5 is a modern marvel, a hybrid computerized camera – it can shoot video, stills or a combination of both. So what I’ve been making became less a picture-story and more a long-form video montage of a too-tall eyesore in our neighborhood vanishing right before our eyes.
But I used the same still-picture story-strategy when shooting these videos: I observed the scene as a photo-essayist would, searching for the most significant details to mold the static pictures into a full story. It all starts, and continues, from that perspective – serious observation of what unfolds in front of me, letting the story tell itself.
Also, it helps to draw a distinction here between “street photography” and “photojournalism” … While a street photographer may be content with a spectacularly spontaneous single frame before moving onward, photojournalists learn to “hang out” at the venue of their stories – thinking beyond a few single frames, prepared to consider how each frame relates to other shots that come before and after it in the developing photo-story sequence. We previously looked at photojournalism in an essay recalling the great diary-filmmaker, Jonas Mekas: here.
* * *
and the heart. The objective of this joint operation is to depict
the content of some event which is in the process of unfolding,
and to communicate impressions … You must be on the alert with
the brain, the eye, the heart: and have a suppleness of body.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
* * *
Here are primary considerations any street-savvy photojournalist needs to turn into intuitive practice by doing it repeatedly, until we don’t have to think about it:
FLY-ON-THE-WALL Approach: A good photojournalist needs to stay unobtrusive
when approaching subjects in the wild – striving for stealth, hoping to be a fly-on-the-wall. This means not calling attention to our work while doing it. Hiding-in-plain-sight is the goal, so the story can tell itself while we try to stay out of the way.
FRAMING the Pictures: Photojournalists do not take “snapshots”. The full surface
area of the picture is valuable so every centimeter of every frame needs to be held to account. Photographers follow other visual artists when we rely on compositional techniques like “Leading Lines”, “Geometric Juxtapositions”, “The Rule of Thirds”, “The Rule of Odds” or “Symmetry” to frame a picture. The best way to learn this way of seeing is to spend lots of time in museums, galleries and books, evaluating paintings by great artists and photos by great photographers (see listing of books at “Furthermore” at the end of this essay). John Lindstrom’s slide shows certainly instilled, by example, this understanding in his students.
FRAMING the Story: Also, a photographer must be a good image juggler, like a
muse-in-seine attending to the compositional elements of balance, contrast, focus, motion, pattern, proportion, rhythm and unity to order the static images into a linear movement, like moving through a series of galleries. This kind of framing not only happens at the scene of the shoot, but also in post-production assembly of the images into a sequence.
TIMING: Being in The-Right-Spot-At-The-Right-Time is a skill often left to
intuition. Are we quitting too soon, packing up to leave before the “story” has “ended”? Bring snacks and water, take sufficient bathroom breaks. Be prepared to stay until “The Very End”, whatever we may perceive that to be intuitively, in the moment of observing the story as it unfolds. This kind of work takes enormous patience – as photographers, we must learn to tell our-own-impatient-selves: “Wait for it!” … Cartier-Bresson’s comments on “the decisive moment”further clarify the necessity of “At-The-Right-Time”.
DEADLINES: It’s difficult for photojournalists to determine when we’re actually
“done” with an assignment. Sports photographers have an advantage in that they know when ball games should predictably end. News photographers often have deadlines which determine when they must leave the scene of a story. But for artists working outside deadlines, it can be difficult to tell our first takes from the last.
Nobody wants to “miss the money shot” … so patience must become the leading virtue for this kind of work. As Cartier-Bresson points out:
“The photographer must make sure, while he is still in the presence of the unfolding scene, that he hasn’t left any gaps, that he has really given expression to the meaning of the scene in its entirety, for afterward it is too late. He is never able to wind the scene backward in order to photograph it all over again.”
* * *
Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
Indeed, another way to see this would be that the photographer is “developing” the story. In the Twentieth Century, photographers shot film that literally needed to be chemically developed before any latent images could became present. We all knew film takes time.
But in a digital world, there’s no waiting for anything to develop. The light has spoken to the camera’s sensor the instant it was captured, and that’s that but for the computer color-grading. No mess, no chemicals. No waiting on The Lab. Half a day can quickly disappear in a darkroom. Film developing takes hours to process and dry. Then photo prints need to be made from film negatives, one at a time in another slow chemical process.
The traditional still image has been repurposed in mirrorless cameras like mine that function as video and still cameras, or a hybrid of both. Most modern tv programs and movies have several freeze-frame, or pixilated moments to connote time passing – as a quick replacement for a montage to move the story forward. These “shots” are all done on these hybrid cameras. Also, I imagine our old journalism school no longer maintains the expense of a darkroom. Leave that to the history department!
Anyone interested in seeing how all this fits together on a screen can see my current project – all shot mostly on 4K video. Like a baby, the project took nine months to develop and I had to learn how to deal with intimidating work flow issues. Digital files of 4K clips take tons of memory and hard drive space. This project forced me to learn how to shoot, import, edit and post video like a tv news crew. Credit goes to YouTube video gurus: Ryan Harris, Caleb Pike, Gerald Undone, Caleb Hoover, Robin Wong, Dale Sood, Lizzie Peirce, Tom Buck, and the Everyday Dad.
You can see those videos here (a dozen shorts – total time under 50 minutes):
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FURTHERMORE:
Manchester, William. In Our Time: The World As Seen by Magnum Photographers. New York: Norton, 1989.
National Gallery of Art. On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography. Boston: Little Brown/Bulfinch Press, 1989.
Leongard, John. Life Classic Photographs: A Personal Interpretation. Boston: Little Brown, 1988.
Rowell, Galen. Mountain Light. Covelo CA: Yolla Bolly Press, 1986.
Del Valle, J. Bourke. Brassaï. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968.
Kirstein, Lincoln. W. Eugene Smith. New York: Aperture, 1969.
Kismaric, Carole. André Kertész. New York: Aperture, 1977.
Phillips, Sandra S. André Kertész of Paris and New York. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Heyman, Therese Thau. Celebrating a Collection of The Work of Dorothea Lange. Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1978.
Maddow, Ben. The Photography of Max Yavno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Thompson, Jerry L. Walker Evans at Work. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
Adams, Ansel. An Autobiography. Boston: Little Brown, 1986.
Binder, Walter. Jacques-Henri Lartigue Album. Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1986.
Riboud, Marc. Photographs at Home and Abroad. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986.
Haworth-Booth, Mark. Paul Strand. New York: Aperture, 1987.
Galassi, Peter. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work. New York: MOMA, 1987.
Cravens, R.H. Edward Weston. New York: Aperture, 1988.
Editors of Time-Life Books. Documentary Photography: Revised Edition. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1983.
Rhode, Robert B. and McCall, Floyd H. Press Photography: Reporting with a Camera. New York: Macmillan, 1961.
Lyons, Nathan. Photographers on Photography. Englewood Cliffs N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
Sloane, Eric. Our Vanishing Landscape. New York: Ballantine, 1974.
The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
https://www.nrm.org/about/
Country Doctor by W. Eugene Smith:
https://www.life.com/history/w-eugene-smiths-landmark-photo-essay-country-doctor/
Magnum’s YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBhIG6Gcc-7K89ypynoV_qw
Wiki on Composition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_(visual_arts)
