Editors at National Geographic said Sam Abell's pictures were quiet, implying too quiet, when he was a photography intern there at the beginning of his career. But he chose not to change his style. He decided to retain his subtlety, but do it better.
This I heard last week at his FotoWeek DC lecture about his photography career. Abell also showed series of photos he made while on assignments and explained the compositional elements that did and didn't work, plus his reasons for the changes in each, the linear progression of his thinking. He says that he shoots "from back to front," meaning that he finds a background he likes and then waits for something to happen in the foreground. He stressed the importance of having a top and a bottom, which could be clouds at the top and a strip of ground to balance and define the bottom. He chooses a spot, waits for moments and fine-tunes spacing so that there is a separation of elements within the composition. That last part can make or break the photo, he said. In his photos, a woman's shadow has just enough white space separating it from a building's shadow; a monkey's head has a sliver of water separating the lake from the horizon. After he pointed it out my eye would go straight to those spots showing expert precision and careful framing.
I was also inspired to jot down a few notes during Magnum photographer Chris Anderson's lecture. Anderson didn't start off with the intention of becoming a photojournalist and is still uncomfortable with the term. He didn't say exactly why but it had something to do with his belief that there is no objectivity in photography. I agree with that bit of it but the connection isn't clear.
Early in his career he went to Haiti and documented a group of men trying to sail to the U.S. He came close to drowning, were it not for a U.S. Coast Guard rescue. He said he wanted to experience what others experience on a journey to a better life and used photography as an excuse to be there. The impetus to photograph as a means of gaining insight on the human condition and to personally experience more in life definitely resonates with me.
Anderson became disillusioned and burnt out with photography in 2003 and worked past it by returning to the way he used to shoot when he first developed his passion. He started experimenting with a Holga and choosing subject matter by tuning in to whatever stirred emotional reactions, whatever caught his eye. The need for perfect layering and compositional complexity had made photography less fulfilling for him. "Often it's like we're making pictures for other photographers," he said.
Emotion is what Anderson is really after. "All I want to do is feel something when I look at a picture. Everything else is a trick and that gets a little boring," he said. While a well-executed photograph is important, the best images go beyond the visual tricks to show some emotion and maybe something about the human condition, I surmised from the lecture.
