Selfie

I surrender. I have given up on the commitments of traditional documentary photography before I even honestly attempted them. I will never be invited to join Magnum, or VII, or any other photo agency who supports my most admired photographers. Maybe in the next life I will find myself on that path, but in this life, it just isn't in the cards.

From my self education, I've learned that traditional photojournalists find it embarrassing to turn the camera on themselves. The story was always out there, in front of them, over the horizon or around the corner, the more exotic or dangerous, the better. Never would they choose to arrogantly participate in the story. But maybe that assertion is naive. Maybe the camera was their mirror and always will be. The stories photojournalists choose to tell, the places, people and events they photograph, have always been chosen by the photographer themselves, at least in their personal projects. Those choices were based on the photographer's own ego, fears, or ambitions, so each story told always had the underlying touch of the author.

Writers like Joan Didion, those associated with "New journalism," found ways to insert themselves into the story. They reported on current events, politics, fashion, war, always from the first person perspective. Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and others of their style combined traditional investigative reporting with their own emotions and experiences, bluring the line between fact and fiction. Didion is one of my favorite writers, and I think we all could benefit from her lessons. She seemed to find a way to write about the world, but at the same time, write about herself. She wrote, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

Documentary photography requires two critical components; time and access. Recall examples of your favorite or memorable issues of Life Magazine or National Geographic. Country Doctor by W. Eugene Smith, for example, followed Dr. Ernest Ceriani as he cared for his community in rural Kremmling, Colorado in 1948. He treated a young girl kicked by a horse. He amputated an elderly man's gangrenous leg. Smith had unimaginable access to the dramas of rural cowboy country, and his career could afford the time it took to earn the doctor's trust. The story goes that Smith shot for a period of time with no film in his camera to help the doctor become accustomed to his presence without wasting film.

There are modern examples, as well. Lynsey Addario, Ron Haviv, Ed Kashi, Danny Wilcox Frasier, and Matt Black are photographers I admire for their commitments, their obsessions, to the craft. The time and special access that are required to tell their stories likely seem out of reach for most of us.

But that does not suggest we cannot find a space in the documentary photography atmosphere.

Visual Journaling

If time and access are essential, where are you guaranteed to find them? What story can you commit to each day? Your own. You decide your time commitment, you decide the access to your life. You can give your camera as much or as little as you like.

If you're motivated to tell your story, a true story, then you're confronted with not only choosing the story you want to live, but actually living it. Through this lens, you aknowledge your desires, your needs, and you set out on the journey to find them. You also welcome conflict because your story needs it. Only through conflict can you show your character. Only through challenge, burden, surprise, loss, triumph, will your plot emerge. With a camera around your neck and a pen in your hand (or a typewriter), your eyes are open, and your heart is open, and your voice is open, and your story surrounds you.

This is all to say that the selfie, the reflection in the storefront window, the silhouette or the shadow stretched across the beach at sunset, exists for many reasons, but for sure exists and survives to selfishly see what your circumstance has provided for you, to understand for yourself where you fit in this world, and remember what it meant to be you.