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The Insiders

Hin Chua — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:19:01 +0000

When I belatedly discovered photography several years ago, a book being consistently recommended as an essential component of my self-directed education was David Hurn and Bill Jay’s On Being a Photographer. Eager and anxious to make up for lost time, I acquired a copy and began devouring it as rapidly as possible. Upon reaching page 89 however, I distinctly remember being stopped in my tracks, forcing myself to repeatedly reread the text:

Examine the lives of people who have truly excelled in any of the arts – music, theatre, dance, sculpture – and they all have one characteristic in common: the capacity to commit themselves wholeheartedly to their chosen disciplines. They do it every day. No excuses.
…
The fact is that photographers at the highest level have committed themselves to continuous and dedicated practice. Fierce single-mindedness and self-motivation are essential. It is very, very rare to find a part-time photographer in the front ranks. This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion.
…
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the very best photographers of the past and present – whether reportage photographers or artist-photographers – have been/are professionals.
…
Through professional photography (they) practice their craft on a continuous basis and, in so doing, become better at it.

Despite the obvious logic underpinning the argument, I found myself almost irrationally perturbed by that statement. Having just relocated from Australia to London and ensconced in a job that was both interesting and well-paying, I had no option or desire to abandon it all for the haphazard existence of a freelance photographer. So then, barely a year into photography, were my legs to be severed from beneath me before this grand new adventure had truly commenced? Was I doomed then to remain a weekend warrior, an effete dilettante spending more time talking about photography on the Internet than actually doing it?

In an attempt to avoid this fate, I knew that it was essential at my stage of development to photograph regularly somehow. After considerable to-ing and fro-ing, an accommodation was eventually reached, one that was more on my terms: I began bringing a camera along to work, photographing my surroundings. And as this project progressed and I slowly learned my craft, I became increasingly fascinated with other photographers who had been in a similar situation, those who had found themselves recording their own jobs:

The Insiders.

Michael Julius

For ten years, Michael Julius worked as an emergency medical technician in Putnam County, Florida. Over that time, his experiences coalesced into the body of work called Rescuing Putnam. He currently lives in Taiwan, teaching English with his wife Hannah.

My friend Michael David Murphy first introduced me to Julius’ work; I was immediately captivated and began a dialogue to find out more about the project. I began by asking him about Putnam County:

This community that I spent the last 10 years in is about as Southern as it gets (or as a nod to nearby China: ‘Southern with Florida Characteristics’). In a draft for a statement, Hannah and I constructed a setting that still feels true to me:

“The residence of Putnam County, North Florida sprawl across a rolling 827 square miles of sand, pocked with hundreds of small lakes, and tucked in tangly forests. They live in trailers and shacks, along webs of unpaved roads. Their automobiles tend to be permanently coated in sugar sand. This is the South of sweet tea and collard greens, Jesus and short, hard falls from salvation. At least, that is what I saw ten years ago when I arrived as a new paramedic. As a rookie I was characteristically gung-ho for getting caught-up in this tangle.”

Putnam County is listed as the 7th poorest county in the state of Florida. It’s what I heard often from administrators and officers in the rescue service but I never had any real facts. I just now confirmed it but these numbers are from the 2000 census. With the economy as it is I’m sure that it has worsened. In particular among those who have often found their way into my ambulance the means of living tends to be in the semi-skilled trades. Most of my former patients work in various manual labor jobs and many are basically self-employed. They do a roofing job on occasion, clear some land with a borrowed bush-hog, grind stumps or find their way to a construction crew to work for some shaky contractor. Money is always tight but they do the best that they can with what they have. I have on occasion given money to family members so that they could put enough gas in the work truck to pick up sick relatives from the hospital.

I then asked Michael why he began photographing his job:

I have been a photographer for most of my life…but never in any professional sense. It has long been my way to go live and just record things. Photography has always been, for me, a way to just be in the world. I have spent so long practicing this craft in such a specific way that it is basically impossible for me to have any kind of substantive or fulfilling life as a professional photographer. I actually ended up as a medic because I knew it was going to be an experience. I ended up in the woods in an ‘everyman’ place like Putnam County because I trusted in providence to deliver me to a place that would be interesting. Putnam County was the first rescue service to offer me a job.

I photographed my job on again and off again for 10 years. But there were times when I didn’t have anything particular on my mind, so it wasn’t any kind of organized intent. I also spent a couple of years during this time living in New York and working as a photographers’ assistant. I came back for the holidays when there was extra money to be made in overtime and in the summer when many people took their vacations.

One of the reasons I found ‘Rescuing Putnam’ so stimulating was that it was shorn of many of the dramatic and frankly hackneyed visual conventions associated with photojournalistic projects of a similar vein. To me, many of the photographs seemed almost exhausted, with the protagonist trapped in a bizarre dream world. I enquired about this:

When I first got into this line of work the opportunity to see something important, and more than just see – to participate, was probably my biggest motivation. I wanted an ‘essential’ experience. I wanted to help and I wanted to see life lived (then not) at the edges of our physical existence. Perhaps it sounds morbid but I wanted to be involved in a space that people pass through. My first fundamental and life-changing experience of this was a save early in my career. My partner and I were delayed by, of all things, a gray fox that ran in front of the ambulance, leaped into the woods then back again two more times. When we reached the residence, the patient’s wife was in the yard screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” In the house we intubated this prone man. We were already familiar with him. He had chronic respiratory problems and a tendency to call us just before he would slip into respiratory failure. He was blue and his heart rate was slowing; however, our interventions were successful and his skin color improved. He began to regain consciousness, though it wasn’t until we were at the hospital that he really began to recover.

Beginning with that damn fox, what happened at that call changed me forever. My partner, the son of a Baptist minister, was steeped in this kind of peculiar Southern elemental experience, yet we both still get a little breathless when we recall that night. It was also the night in which I became a clinician. Watching his skin color change, which was at first subtle, then dramatic, gave me a new set of eyes. But something else happened. When I was intubating I had a very clear image of extending a hand to a man slipping down the steep slope of a hole. It’s real enough in my mind that it’s all wrapped up in my recollection as an actual part of that night. It was very moving and reminded me how important the work is. A few months later, he did finally fall in. He called too late. I will never forget him.

Statistically, this is a career that doesn’t lend itself to a lengthy service. The average career span for your basic garden-variety medic is 3-5 years. For me, the burnout was as much about the physical toll on the body as anything. Every three days I would essentially stay up all night. This, compounded by the repetitive aspect of the job, is exhausting. By repetitive I mean that I eventually realized that I was seeing the same people over and over. Some are actually sick though many are not, or at least not in an emergent sense. The skill-set to evaluate the needs of your sick and hurt patients eventually became a hindrance because I saw how so many of them were in fact not sick at all. It’s frustrating. Towards the end of my career I told a drug seeking patient, who had just finished performing a hilariously bad seizure, “You know, seizure patients usually urinate on themselves.” I wanted to see her piss herself. That’s pretty cynical.

We end up at the same houses. Houses full of thieves and alcoholics, with the same adolescent boys sitting on fence posts, or car hoods, or tossing footballs; and, when we arrive they pitch their thumbs, mumbling, “They’re in the back.” And in the back are the same old patients, face down in their vomit. It breaks my heart to see these boys conditioned to this. The very last patient of my career spit on me and said, “Clean that up, bitch”. It’s a river of misery and it goes on forever.

In the last couple of years I began to entertain the idea that what we do is often not so helpful. To the truly sick and injured we are a godsend, and to be involved in their care is something I can barely describe. It’s a euphoria. It’s a sense that you are involved in a seriously important part of life, and not just their life but life in its larger sense. We really do participate in that space that people pass through. It’s a privilege. To the rest, which is to say ‘most’ of my patients, I have often wondered whether we actually harm them by taking away a certain amount of self-reliance.

But please don’t confuse this with simple disenchantment. I am certainly not done with healthcare. When we return to the states I will continue my career as a nurse, and eventually, a Nurse Practitioner. I want to be involved with helping people help themselves. I may drive an ambulance to see myself through the schooling but only to transfer patients from facility to facility. I can’t serve as a medic the way that I did. I don’t want to go back down there.

‘Rescuing Putnam’ is a prime example of why I find insider photography so compelling. It doesn’t suffer from many of the constraints of ‘straight’ documentary work: there is no requirement for objectivity and seriousness, or to paint the subject in a respectful politically correct light. By very definition, the photographer cannot be an unbiased observer and instead is an active participant in the work. The gloves of detachment can be removed, to be replaced by stronger, often darker emotions.

The long-term immersion inherent in many such projects also often lends a different atmosphere and almost claustrophobic intimacy to the photographs. Unlike many traditional projects, it’s harder to take time out, to switch subjects or change locations if inspiration wanes. In many ways, the photographer is almost trapped, forced into creating something meaningful within a strictly defined combination of physical and temporal constraints.

The following works are some notable insider projects that I’m aware of:

Can you think of other good examples?

Corey Arnold

Corey Arnold spends half the year working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska.

Compare and contrast his work to the Magnum photographer Jean Gaumary’s seminal Pleine mer.

A NPR interview with Arnold can be found here.

Andy Summers

Andy Summers played guitar for the Police.

Summers’ photographs were published as the book I’ll Be Watching You: Inside the Police, 1980-83.

A review by the Sydney Morning Herald can be found here.

John Pilson

John Pilson worked on weekend and night shifts for a Manhattan investment bank between 1994 and 2000.

Pilson’s photographs were published as the book Interregna.

A review by Jeff Ladd on 5B4 can be found here.

Juliana Beasley

Juliana Beasley worked as an exotic dancer for eight years.

Beasley’s work became the book Lapdancer.

An interview with Beasley on the Modernist can be found here.

Chris Shaw

Chris Shaw spent ten years on the night shift in various London hotels.

Shaw’s experiences were published as the book Life as a Night Porter.

A review by Douglas Stockdale on The PhotoBook can be found here.

A review by Jeff Ladd on 5B4 can be found here.

Arnold Odermatt

Arnold Odermatt was a traffic policeman in Switzerland from 1948 to 1990.

His experiences were made into the books Karambolage and On Duty.

A review by Frieze Magazine can be found here.

A review of Karambolage by Lensculture can be found here.

A review of On Duty by Jeff Ladd on 5B4 can be found here.

Hin Chua

As for myself, between 2005 and 2007 I was employed at a multinational investment bank in the heart of London’s financial district, the Square Mile. A dense, organic maze of passageways and alleys interconnecting a series of distinctive, futuristic high-rises, it became to me the most visually stimulating area in the entire city. During a period of unprecedented financial prosperity and excess, there were distinctive, often surreal scenes to be chanced upon and I was soon photographing extensively both inside and outside of the workplace. So for two to four hours each weekday in good weather and bad, I found myself exploring and cataloguing every nook and cranny of this weirdly wonderful hive of capitalism.

In many ways, the work that constituted this project became my photographic education. I was able to shoot on a consistent basis and gradually teach myself some of the lessons required for conceiving and executing a long-term project. Ultimately this didn’t just assist in my development: it bought me the time to ascertain what I really wanted to photograph, to find out what I was best suited for. After eighteen months I left my job to travel and upon returning to London, there was no real appetite for resuming the project. By this stage I had already discovered other rainbows to chase.

Typology in the Public Domain

Ben Roberts — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:47:21 +0000

This morning I followed a tweet from the Telegraph Picture Desk that led me to a facebook group started by some people in the north-east of England. I found the images immediately compelling: lo-fi in execution, yet individual photographs moved me in different ways – some humorous, some sinister.

by Jessica via Facebook

by Wayne Pyle via Facebook

What continues to amaze me is the power of photography and the internet to inspire the public imagination. It’s easy to dismiss these internet phenomenons as fads or a temporary craze; however I find the sheer velocity of these internet movements to be quite incredible – from a Facebook group that was started sometime around the middle of June to the pages of several national newspapers in around three weeks!

by Wayne Pyle via Facebook

For me the beauty of the “Lying Down” group is its apparent lack of motive. There is no intention to make art as such, yet driven by competitiveness and a sense of humour, the imagination of the contributors is forced to be increasingly inventive.

by Lynda Armstrong via Facebook

by Philip Barton via Facebook

by Christina Cowley via Facebook

by Linzi Whatnell via Facebook

Perhaps the reason why I was drawn to these images also had something to do with the naive appropriation of a commonly used motif within photography: the prostrate stranger, photographed unaware – examples of which have been featured recently here on insig.ht:

by Tod Papageorge

by Mark Powell

A motif that has also been covered by insig.ht contributors:

by Hin Chua

by Michael David Murphy

by Raoul Gatepin

Do you have other examples of well known photographers using this style? What are your thoughts and feelings about public use of photography via social networking? Do you know of any fine art or professional photographers who have harnessed the power of social networking to produce mass participation artworks based around simple typology? We’d be intrigued to hear from you.

Wanted in Iran: The Photographs

Michael David Murphy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:56:44 +0000

Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” has done substantial work covering the protests against the election in Iran. His post this morning “Counter-Targeting the Protestors” led to a site controlled by the Iranian government, where the regime was posting candid photographs of Mousavi supporters demonstrating in the streets, and using the site as a plea to the public to help with identifications.

In looking at these pictures, I was struck by their strength as photographs, not just as politically-charged documents, but as pictures with their own aesthetic power. They’re digital WANTED posters, essentially, and I’ve never seen anything like them. The foregrounds, the backgrounds, the croppings, the candidness of the subjects, the intention of the unknown photographer(s), the ominous red halos (or targets), the use of the images – everything about them is compelling, captivating, subject to discussion, and unknowable.

The Iranian gov’t site is currently down, but I was able to grab all 77 of the images. They’re available here as a zip file: Wanted.zip, or in this set Wanted in Iran on flickr.

I’d be interested to see if there’s some kind of creative remixing that might occur with these. Their provenance is as mysterious as their subject. Might the photographs have been made by Mousavi supporters, posted to pro-Mousavi sites, and then downoloaded and photoshopped by the regime? Or would the regime have their own cadre of photographers out photographing protestors (a common sight in San Francisco, New York, or London) to create evidence that might enable prosecutions down the line?

While their intended use is painfully clear, as digital photographs, there’s a unique and troubling power in their aggregate. Let us know what you think below, and if you have great ideas for their repurposing, please share what you’ve done.

Digging deeper into Tod Papageorge’s ‘Passing Through Eden’

Hin Chua — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:38:16 +0000

Over the last couple of years, there’s been much discourse and deliberation over Tod Papageorge’s book Passing Through Eden. In March, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a talk he gave in London as part of the events surrounding his nomination for the 2009 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

For those new to the work, Passing Through Eden was influenced by the biblical Book of Genesis:

The sequencing of the book, or at least the first half of it, is quite literally based on the first six chapters of Genesis. The world, or Eden, or Central Park, is created in the first half-dozen pictures, one for each day of the Creation: Adam appears as a pile of molten dust, then as his radiant self; Eve arrives opposite a picture of bleached branches that, to me, suggests her emergence from Adam’s rib; and on it goes… – Tod Papageorge

Flipping through my own copy of the book, I’d often speculated on the nature and emphasis of this biblical allusion, wondering just how explicit it was beyond the initial few pages. With my days of enforced scripture class long past, I struggled to discern much beyond a few vague inferences and eventually resigned myself to a state of muted perplexity.

Fortunately, during the presentation Papageorge generously volunteered some insights into his editing process and I found myself both surprised and impressed by the ambition behind the work. Rather than entrusting to a generally amorphous Genesis-themed representation, individual photographs were selected to denote characters and incidents within specific verses of the bible.

To illustrate, here are a few images that were specifically highlighted: I’ve added relevant excerpts from Genesis to flesh out the back story. With these images serving as chronological markers, I was then also able to identify additional connections from the biblical text.

So God created man in his own image

Adam

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Eve

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Adam and Eve

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.

The Serpent

And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Eve and the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Eve eating the fruit

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

'The eyes of both were opened'

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The explusion from Paradise

And Adam knew Eve his wife…

'And Adam knew Eve his wife...'

and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Adam and Cain

Adam and Abel

Cain and Abel

And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

The murder of Abel

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand;

God admonishing Cain

And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

The marked Cain

Until that point, I had never quite realised how deeply down the rabbit hole Papageorge had descended; it would be fair to say that neither myself or the majority of the audience expected such an intimate relationship between the photos and the text. Afterwards, I asked my friends A and Z for their opinions, which proceeded to differ by the range of the alphabet:

It’s completely changed my approach to looking at the work, I’ll have to re-examine everything in light of this! – A

Without doubt it’s a clever exercise and adds some meat to the project, but ultimately, and in the nicest way, they’re still just photos made in Central Park, no more, no less. – Z

Equally provoking was the reminder that the Genesis motif had been conceived only as the book was being assembled, long after the photos had been made. What A and Z said started me thinking about the effectiveness of similar projects that have been conceptualised post-hoc, after the act of making the work. However, I soon ran into difficulty when identifying strongly-themed projects that were admittedly ‘post-hoc’; it’s something that never seems to be advertised as such.

Alec Soth’s The Last Days of W sounds like it was made post-hoc, while Jason Fulford’s Raising Frogs for $ $ $ (some pictures here) might fall under this category too, but beyond that few obvious candidates sprang immediately to mind (please feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment).

Without wanting to enter into a deep philosophical and theoretical debate (but with a hankering for a shallow one), I posed the question to some friends: can you think of reasons why projects like these appear to be a rarity?

One theory was that they were more common than admitted to:

I even suspect many photographers are lying when they say they had it all planned in advance and that they spent ages working on one particular concept, when in fact they just threw it together at the end. It feels like the former approach is regarded as more respectable: smarter and more insightful. – R

If lying is too strong a word, than perhaps a post-facto recognition of organic growth:

And honestly, I think the most lying happens when someone realizes that they’ve stumbled across their subject matter which they happen to have been shooting for years, but just haven’t realized it. Then, upon realization, they’ve been doing it on purpose all along, naturally. – M

The band played on, leading to a thought-provoking discussion which arose from a query by Eliot Shepard regarding the difficulty and validity of bringing meaning to work seemingly made at random. Reading through it, the point being made was that ultimately of course, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter how the photos were made or if there was any conscious intent behind their making or whether said intent was later attached to them. All that matters is that they “work” as a collective whole. A photographer sufficiently talented, ruthless and intelligent will find a successful approach to photographing, editing and sequencing.

As Michael David Murphy put it:

A collection of strong photographs held together by an oblique concept (that allows the viewer the space to breathe and create their own connections) is an experience that can’t be touched by an easy-to-describe project with an air-tight, marketable concept populated with unfeeling, anaemic pictures.

The concept is not king. Randomness is a myth.

Does Passing Through Eden succeed in this respect? The answer has to be undoubtedly yes. The Genesis theme, while fascinating (especially upon further revelation), isn’t evident to many readers, nor is it necessary to the success of the images. Instead, it hangs like a delicate thread throughout the book, sometimes glimpsed, flitting in and out of the light. There are no heavy-handed concepts that burst forth to remorselessly hammer themselves into the viewer’s psyche; rather, sufficient latitude is preserved for individuals to draw their own conclusions. The work can be successfully appreciated in either complete ignorance, semi-awareness (with the perception of a palpable yet indistinct Genesis reference: my state of “muted perplexity”), or the full awareness that comes with being able to connect the dots between individual images.

Papageorge himself said it best:

…the fact is that attempting to weave these disparate images into some twentieth-century New York City version of the First Story gave me a form that I felt could provide a much more flexible armature for the shape of the book (and the large number of pictures I wanted to include in it) than the usual photographic monograph. I also wanted to make a book that could be understood in as many ways as possible, even if it risked the possibility that a reader more interested in decoding the sequence of Biblical references could well miss the ambition informing the pictures, and what I hope is the poetry animating them.

Clever man that he is, that goal has successfully been achieved.

Another clever man is Alec Soth. While the Last Days of W may not have been well-received in some quarters (indeed that particular critique highlights some of the potential minefields in post-facto projects), Soth has been spectacularly successful in other endeavours.

I recall having a convivial chat with someone quite high up the Magnum food chain about this:

You know, that Alec Soth is a very, very clever fellow.

Really?

Yeah… you know NIAGARA of course? It has a theme of love running throughout:there’s a repeated heart motif in many of the images. But did you know that to maintain this, Soth also actually POSED the couples he photographed in a shape of a heart?? Now THAT’S clever!

Regardless of the veracity of this tale and Soth’s actual intentions, the best part about this anecdote is that like any truly great conspiracy theory, there’s just enough evidence for it to be vaguely plausible. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s just a fascinating (or ridiculous, depending on your perspective) story that may add to the NIAGARA mystique.

Take a look for yourself: do you see hearts? Do you care?

Aleisha and Joe

Martha and Anthony

Michelle and Pedro

As many have already noted: he’s a clever man that Alec Soth…

All photographs in this article © Tod Papageorge and Alec Soth respectively.
Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park by Tod Papageorge. NIAGARA by Alec Soth.

Additional notes

Blake Andrews includes a great comparison with Robert Crumb.