honest voices

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been working on my master's project. A lot of that work has been laborious and frustrating — trying to gain access to photograph an inmate at the women's prison in northeast Missouri. I've had a lot of ups and downs. But in between the phone calls and the meetings and the waiting and the research, I've been doing these incredible interviews with female project photographers whom I respect and admire as human beings and whose work inspires me to keep at it. I want to share some of the things they've said here. Eventually, this stuff will turn into a cohesive piece of writing about how who we are as individuals — and the way we process our experiences — translates to our work. But in the meantime, here's some of the raw material...

Maggie Steber:

"I grew up an only child raised by an only parent, and all of the people that I’ve photographed — well, a great majority of them — have become friends or closer. There is an emotional exchange. It's like being in a field of flowers, and you’re wearing a skirt or an apron, and you start collecting the flowers in the apron, and pretty soon you have this huge and bright and beautiful collection of flowers; and when you photograph people the same thing sort of happens. You start to be involved with people’s lives; they are involved with your life quite often. You do form some real lasting friendships, but it sort of goes back to making yourself vulnerable. We ask people to be vulnerable to open themselves up to us so that we can see something and try to capture it or grasp it. And I think it won't happen unless we also are sharing things."

"I think I’m very empathetic. I sound like Bill Clinton, but I really feel people’s pain, and I want to understand their stories, and I think the only way to sort of do that is to try to get inside their head or their heart or their shoes, or whatever it is you need to get inside of, and try to understand them and what they’re dealing with and how it affects them. You can’t go in and really get to the truth of anything unless you’re empathetic. It's different from being sympathetic, but you actually can understand and grasp something that wasn’t as obvious, so I think empathy is a very important quality to have. And, like I said before, being a good listener. I found this out a long time ago — and that is that no matter how much research you do, how much reading you do, how much you prepare, when you’re going into somebody else’s culture and even somebody else’s life, you have to go in like a baby and let them teach you. It’s sort of like the blank page that you give them to write their story. People can really teach you a lot. And not just about themselves and their story, but they can really teach you about life. You really have to do the homework, but then you have to go in and be a little-bitty baby and let them teach you about these things. Because again, if you want the work to be authentic and serious and truthful and achieve a goal, then you have to be the baby and let them teach you. It’s really critical. And not everybody feels that way, and that’s where maybe people tend to be less objective — I mean they go in with a particular point of view in mind or with a certain goal in mind which has nothing to do with point of view. But I think when you’re going into other cultures and people’s lives, you’ll never understand them if you think you already know it. And it’s so tedious to act as though you knew it all already. That’s sort of what life is about too, to be honest, in general."

"I think building your intuition and becoming intuitive about where you are and what you’re doing and how it's affecting the people you’re photographing and how it affects you and that sort of thing is very critical. There’s no way to get around it. You just have to put in the time so to speak. I think in a nutshell it comes with experience. But you know, not always, it depends, — like some people are just thick-headed. I have to say this about intuition. It's really where you’ve got to keep your ego out of it because ego can be very misleading and throw you off your mark, so to speak. Sometimes it’s a real danger for photographers in that we really have to keep our egos subdued and keep them in our back pocket where we can sit on them if we need to, you know what I mean, because egos don’t always allow us to make ourselves vulnerable. You know, we ask people to be vulnerable when we photograph them, and we’re not always willing to be vulnerable as photographers, or as people. So I think we have to be as vulnerable and sort of emulate the humility that a lot of people have who we photograph."

Brenda Ann Kenneally:

"Well, I feel like I’m different than everybody, even if they don’t do this kind of work — isolation, paranoia, all kinds of things. I mean just from the people I know and the people whose work I read, everybody wants to take something grizzly out of their past and connect it to what they’re doing today. I really do come from a past of being disenfranchised. … So I really do understand and know what it feels like to be caught in the fringes of some kind of larger society looking in, and I wrestle with that and I guess that’s why I’m so passionate about my work because its sort of multi-layered. If I do it well, then I myself feel validated because I’m doing a good job at something, and also I am so outraged at their injustices because I’ve suffered a lot of my own."

"If you start doing things the big fear is that you’re buying people to let them do your story and you’re not gonna be objective. Anybody who’s seen my work knows that it’s as honest a look as it can be about whomever I’m writing about or photographing or interviewing, and now with video they’re talking about themselves. There is no way that that would even work if it were true because you wouldn’t have that kind of intimacy — they wouldn’t respect you, the whole thing would backfire on you. And it's like any relationship. It's built on emotional exchange, and that’s what we do is emotional exchange."

"I can't remember what I didn’t know about them, but it was a basic run-of-the-mill thing, but yet I knew all these really intimate things, like really dark secrets and their struggles and seeing them at their worst. So I sort of learn about people from the inside-out, so there’s no small talk, and I hate small talk."

"I think I feel that way about social injustices. You tend to form these conspiracy theories, and it would be so much better if you found out that you were just really paranoid and reading too much into things, so the more that I keep going, I get these moments of meeting people along the way who may be activists or whatever where I am actually convinced that I do have something to say, but people seem to go through life like not paying attention."

"I learned to really trust myself more, and what I've learned is that I do have something, like I do see something. I don’t even know if I have something to say, but if I see something I know I have an obligation to say it. So I’ve also learned that I probably am someone who really can go that extra mile with somebody. A lot of people say that they are willing to help you, but even the most well-meaning people don’t know what that looks like on a day-to-day basis. ... I know what it takes to really be a support for someone’s life, and I know that there is only a really small number of people out there actually doing it."

"What I learned is what I suspected — poor women have a really difficult time feeling like they have a right for their place marker in the world, and that’s directly reflected or projected off the messages I got when I was a kid, and I've learned to overcome them. But they’re haunting and they’re formative. Poor women also are victimized by themselves, by the law, by their children, and they pass that on — futures are bleak — but there’s a lot of spirit. There’s a lot of heart. That’s what I’m drawn to, and that's important. And somehow when I’m in the group of whatever company of women, and especially these particular kind of women who have had to do so much to even feel like they’re worthy of breathing, I feel, I just feel that I’m home…"

"They can read the bullshit, and they know when you’re really sort of coming at them from a place that is equitable or this sort of icky condescending outreach thing. I don’t know. It’s just truly ... I feel the spirit of women, sort of … I can’t think of the right word … I think this — I think that the feminist movement completely bypassed the women that it needed to reach out to the most, and I felt that for myself as well. And I feel that these women, including myself, are holding up the bottom rung of the ladder without which their support that rung would fall out. And they are the women that that movement was built on the backs of and the things that women in these universities were fighting for were actually the daily lives of these hard-working women and women that didn’t have men to overshadow them. I dated this Puerto Rican guy for years in Miami. ... His mom was a seamstress. He used to see me as the spirited gringo, which he also fetishized and couldn’t stand, but that was maybe a whole other layer, he said, 'What you gringas consider liberation, my mother considers slavery,' and that always stuck with me. And my mother also, she was one of the first divorced women in our Catholic neighborhood and essentially she'll tell you she stayed with a mentally ill husband who was tough and physically abusive because the Catholic church told her to. Why? Because I admire the real backbone. These people that I’m with are just a concept to the sisters on the front lines that are fighting for our rights."

Lois Raimondo:

"I came to photography after and through other paths. I was never interested in career; I was more interested in story and in the experience of being a storyteller. That was critical for me. ...
I’m interested in people, and I am most comfortable when my learning curve is really high and when I’m in unfamiliar territory, and so being in cultures that are very different from mine is when my learning curve is highest. ... My background is all in comparative culture and comparative literature, so I’m much more anthropological in my approach to journalism than I am news- or event-based."

"So that moment was really pivotal for me because I thought, 'They’re looking at this, and they assume they’re real. And they trust the pictures, but they don’t trust the words. The word people wouldn’t trust them, but the picture people did because they were there right in front of them, and they somehow assumed there was no point of view there. So then I could write the story that I wanted to write to go with that. And, like I said, working on stories that mattered to me was always more important than a career, and so I turned down staff jobs — some pretty good offers — so I could keep doing it until I just got too tired."

"I do know that when I’m making pictures I’m in the middle of it, and it’s a very visceral, sometimes. When it's something that’s important or intense it’s incredibly visceral, and some of the best pictures happen when my mind gets turned off and you’re just in the flow of it. You come to it with everything that you know about the subject, and that’s just sort of a filter on your head that everything gets run through; it's just that you’re not consciously thinking about it all the time."

"When you’re there and you’re a witness to something, and there are no other witnesses or few other witnesses, you have a responsibility to come out and shine some small light on it. If I fail to do that, it's really depressing. So, in that sense. it's hard to separate the personal from the professional because when you work in these situations, you develop relationships with these people. and whether you like them or you don’t like them, you’re engaged in a way that I do feel responsible when I come out."

"And a lot of times you can go back to it and it has a much different meaning to you five years later because there are things you won't understand when you're seeing them, but if you can describe them carefully, later on when you have better knowledge, you can go back and understand them in a better way. So I have notebooks filled like that. Since I moved back to America and I’ve been working at the Washington Post, I don’t write that much at all anymore because I’m not moved in the same way. I think it is because my learning curve has dropped because I’m working in a culture that is ... So I guess the amount of writing that I do depends on how much I’m either learning or how much I’m being touched emotionally by what’s going on."

"I’ll watch very carefully how these people are talking. I watch how people walk across the room, which can say all sorts of things about who they are, who they think they are, who they want other people to think they are. ... And so the intuition, while it might seem a quick decision that gets made, it's informed by watching and listening very carefully to how people interact with others. Intuition has a lot to do with listening and watching and getting yourself out of the way. I think it's your own baggage that blinds you to what’s there. And then beyond all of that, it requires luck."

"I think it's very similar to athletics. I used to be a really serious athlete, and when I got to the Olympic trials, I was young. There was a woman who was much older and slower, but she didn’t waste time and energy on things that weren't necessary. So now when I'm working on a project, whereas before I would have been pursuing four small leads, and then eventually end up with the picture that mattered, now I can wait through those first small things, or know that they’re not gonna pan out and more quickly go to where I need to be, and that’s just experience. With experience, you don’t have to waste as much unnecessary energy just figuring things out."

"The key thing that I’ve learned is that your behavior speaks louder than any words ever could. So whether I’m working in an Indian temple where they're having a prayer ceremony ... I can go in and sit quietly for four hours and just respect them, and it’s the same with the bomb makers — if you respect them, you don’t have to agree with them, but you respect where they are and you do your best to understand. {eople read that so fast and so clearly."

"I don’t want to talk to people about it. I want to write it down pure into my notes, and I want to just experience it with them. Because if I start to talk to people, when I go to write it down it would lose the emotional power that it had. So for myself, though I have always had close friends, the emotional intensity of what I was working on was often reserved for my notebook."

Kathryn Cook:

"I do this not only to kind of share with the world what I’m looking at and my vision of the world, but I’m also doing it for myself. I mean to me it all begins with you. As an artist it begins with how you express yourself and how you wanna be creative and how you start to look at things and process things around you. In the beginning I guess as an observer and then later when you kind of hone your skills, which I haven’t done yet, you make it into more of a narrative with what you think about it in terms of very specific visual language. But that’s all a creative process as a painter, as a drawer, as a musician, as a singer. It's all trying to focus and I guess regurgitate what you’re thinking about and what your emotions are in the world around you."

"You right now are everything you have accumulated since you were young. But now at a different intellectual level and level of maturity, you process things differently, and you enter the world through a different vantage point depending on what your past experiences are. And I think that’s what I journal more about now, and, of course, related to a project — if I’m doing a project — how I’m going to pursue that project."

"This kind of career is one that you’re always soul-searching, you’re always reflecting, you’re always hitting walls with ethical dilemmas — and why are you doing this and the good things and the bad things that come out of stories. That’s my struggle because in my work I want it to be so much about reflection and kind of questioning images and imagery in general that I don’t get depressed. But it's really easy to kind of get lost, to get down on what you’re doing and get off track. I think that in a lot of those journal entries I would find moments of clarity — and moments that it's gonna be OK, and just remind yourself of such and such a thing. Just remind yourself that when it comes down to it it's your journey, and when it comes down to it this is what’s really important. On days you get frazzled and days when you think everything is wrong, then I go back to that (journal entries), and that kind of supports me. It's like my best friend for a couple seconds, I guess."

"Recognizing intuition is for me — maybe it’s the stage I’m in in photography — recognizing is one thing and how to follow it is another — realizing what your intuition means. Intuition in that sense would be — you see something that interests you and it comes from within. Something about something, some element or some person or some landscape pulls you in for some reason or catches your eye. And you follow that, or you don’t. I do follow my intuition quite a bit. I'm sure its developed over time. Because I mean it's kind of like understanding yourself — where you’re coming from and kind of what you connect to immediately — from who you are as a person. The more you read, the more experience you have ... it comes with nurturing yourself as a person. It's born from that."

"You’re like OK, you’ve come so far, and you’ve kind of mastered everything technically, as much as that happens, but more taking risks. You open the bottle, or you don’t. Are you contained in how you were taught, and you’re just going to keep going in that pattern? Or are you going to push yourself and really make yourself into something unique? And that’s very much you and not somebody else telling you what’s right or telling you how you should take a picture or what is right or what is wrong, what works, what’s readable. Forget the BS for a little while and just focus on what comes to you intuitively in a way, but what's real to you and what feels good to you as you can look at an image and be like, 'Yes, that was my moment. That’s more me than what other things have been.' Because there's a lot of influences. And you soak things up and have to kind of break away from that and kind of realize where you are as a person, and that’s been my struggle for the last year or so."

"I think your work is more powerful if you decide this is what I think about this and this is my relationship to how I’m encountering this idea or this theme or whatever, and that’s so much more productive than trying to be overly ... I think objective can get dangerous because people say, 'What about my side?'... There is so much complexity to most of the issues we’re covering that there is no way to pretend that we're being objective. Because you are a human being that has a whole set of experiences different that the people you’re photographing, so to say that you’re telling their story is just a lie … You encounter the world with an opinion, and if you recognize that, your work is gonna reflect that much more honestly than if you kind of push it away and try to deny that. None of us are gonna look at a situation and be like, 'Well, I have to be as fair as possible, and I have to remove myself.' Well, I think that’s a real injustice to what this craft can do, to the communication of photography and the power it has to communicate what you are feeling. And to say that you’re being objective is just a lie. I think that the work that I’ve done when I’ve decided that I’m just going to do what I feel is much more powerful and much more honest than work that’s not trying to do that."

"Ego is always a big issue, especially with artists who have to put their work out there a lot. They’re afraid — they, as in me — are afraid of being rejected, afraid of what people think about your work, if it's good enough, if it's relaying what you wanted to say. So I think you have to just do it because you love to do it, and putting it on a wall or having someone else’s opinion about it is secondary. Because it really is about you growing as a person first; and people understanding you or interpreting what you're saying is secondary. It's always gonna be secondary because your work comes from you, and I think that’s difficult to accept and to understand and to actually follow. It sounds good in words, but can I really do that? It's always a challenge. "

Donna Ferrato:

"So for me it’s a creative process. I mean it's not like I’m making anything up. I don’t believe that’s what photojournalists do. We don’t create, we don’t make up stories, but we have to dig very hard to get to the kernels — the essence of truth — and to have a better understanding of what’s really happening. And for me, also, I tend to live with people once I've gotten to a point where I think that the story is opening up. Then I really want to move in with the person that I’m focused on and spend as much time with them as possible. I like to hear people when they’re talking in their sleep, I need to be so close to them. So all of that is a creative process, but it's working with reality."

"I don’t really think about that so much — how I process it. I just do, I just take it in, and it stays in there and it's in there and I’m introspective enough that there are moments that I need to recall things that have happened and things that I don't understand. If I don’t understand some kind of behavior, then I talk with people about it."

"I really believe in the golden rule, which is, you treat people like you want to be treated, and that’s how I live my life. But it isn’t what I see happening for so many other people, and that’s difficult for me. That’s probably what causes me the most emotional struggle and mental struggle — just trying to figure out how so many people with power can get away with such cruel and inhuman treatment with people."

"Yah, I do (write in a journal). I should really do it a whole lot more, though. I like to look back at my books. I went to do a story on child sexual assault in South Africa in the late nineties. I kept very, very detailed notebooks with people’s names and their stories and what they were going through and my impressions, and it's pretty wonderful actually because the photographs are really just not enough. When you have the words — like the way your mind is thinking when you’re taking the pictures — that gives so much more layer and richness to the images. It makes it all come back again for me."