As we get a little further away from the initial shock of Haiti I’m finding more perspectives on the tragedy and the media’s role in reporting on it. Here are a few links I can recommend that have kept us thinking.

First, a few days ago our friend Scott Strazzante published a beautifully honest post on his blog about his feelings of being a newspaper photographer in Chicago looking out on a world of “big stories”. It reflects the inner thoughts almost all photographers have about their place in the industry, the world and the importance of the work they’re producing.

This was echoed by another talented and thoughtful friend on his blog: Chip Litherland lays out his view on the situation and the importance of the photography emerging from this and other events to his relationship to the world. He has one passage that speaks to his optimism on the importance of the still photographs being produced in Haiti right now:

Soon, headlines will start creeping back to normal type and smaller fonts. Photos will run smaller. Media agencies will pull out of the country. One thing I haven’t felt in a while, though, is a renewed sense of the importance of photojournalism and what we do. I had that thought this morning when I realized I never wanted to watch a television news broadcast again. It’s so watered down, so filtered, so crafted and manufactured it makes me sick. I seek refuge in the glowing screen of my computer and photo galleries, newspapers, magazines and blogs which are putting these photos everywhere. The photos are what people are sharing. Twitter posts about journalists’ posts from the ground. Facebook postings with links to photo galleries. Photos. Not video. Not multimedia. Not a talking head in front of rubble waxing poetic about what a producer saw earlier in the day. Not showing up to the airport, setting up a live shot, saying you’re there covering the story and leaving. Photos. Photos that need no text. Just space to breathe and be seen.

This segues to my rant about American television media and a Washington Post article about the rise of reporter-doctors. Many of us have grown increasingly frustrated with the tactics and presentation of the broadcast media and a situation like this brings out the worst in that institution, insofar as them featuring these acts (performances?) in their broadcasts. I’ve been glancing at CNN’s website a few times since the disaster began and I’m almost certain that there has always been at least one self-congratulatory article or link about the good work (“Anderson Cooper saves injured boy”, “CNN vehicle drafted in rescue”) the broadcast team is doing down there. Are they trying to justify their presence? Are they (subconsciously?) covering their backs from criticism of their presence? Or does their viewership hunger for stories of their pretty reporters helping out, thus feeding ratings… and is this then entertainment (are they actors?)? Of course TV News is in the ratings/entertainment business but are they really playing this out with peoples’ lives in such a crisis? I guess so.

Of course, as with the article above, I am quite happy to see journalists helping out whenever they can (see for instance Christopher Anderson in Lebanon), just keep it the hell out of your ledes and headlines. You are not the story. But it seems this exactly is what the broadcast media is aiming for and it is not a good thing. Especially when so many people get their “news” from these sources, perhaps exclusively.

There are also harder questions to ask, for starters whether or not it is appropriate to arrange a workshop on crisis photography in Haiti. 100eyes founder Andy Levin posted on Sunday his plans to arrange a February workshop in Haiti that will in part “transport food and medicine” and “also offer our services to NGOs who are in need of photographs”. duckrabbit beat us to print with a smart and fair post expressing their outrage and bewilderment at the timing and tact of this proposal. Levin responded to the post with some clarifications, but I am with the majority of commentators on duckrabbit that think this is a bad idea presented even more poorly. They also picked up a metafilter post about burden of enthusiastic but untrained volunteers in Sarajevo that Scott linked to in our first commentary on Haiti (“Like moths to a flame – so many cameras in Haiti”). It is an important and informed counter-point (along with many others brought up by duckrabbits’ commentators) to the idea of sending even more photographers, especially untrained and potentially vulnerable ones, to Haiti’s disaster zone.

Our friend Pete Brook at Prison Photography takes up this issue with Levin and many many more topics in the exhaustive post “Staring at Death: Photographing Haiti”. Catch up on the humanitarian and media situation in Haiti, the galleries of images being assembled and the section titled “How many photographers does it take to photograph a humanitarian disaster?” (which runs down the known photographers working there now).

Seriously, visit Brook’s site for the best up-to-date set of links around. We’re indebted.

Magnum’s Georgian Spring is an incredibly interesting project, and possibly a turning point in photojournalism and agency work. This book, print, web and ‘multimedia’ project is a collaboration with the Georgian state itself, funded by the Ministry of Culture and arranged by photographer Thomas Dworzak with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and independently curated by publisher Chris Boot.
As Scott mentioned when this project first went live, 10 Magnum photographers are involved and are a very interesting cross section of what is being done in photojournalism today. Jörg Colberg, of Conscientious and photojournalism criticism fame, agrees in his review of the book. To quote him, “So there are ten photographic voices, all from the same photojournalistic agency – how could there be a crisis in photojournalism when there is such variety? Or asked in a different way: What kind of crisis?”

I see Georgian Spring as the latest in a series of interesting photographer and agency-driven productions where people are “doing it themselves” with alternative funding methods. I think of two other Magnum projects directly that I’ve always respected: Euro Visions, about the ten new EU states in 2004 in collaboration with Centre Pompidou and Magnum Off-Broadway (a project that deserves a post in itself, definitely coming soon).
Beyond being a necessary development to continue doing the work we’re out in the world to do, these agency and photographer-led projects almost invariably produce more interesting and personal work. (But maybe this is because I’m a photographer? Wonder if there is a breakdown between publication-designed and producer-designed projects with the public?).
There has been some hubbub around VII’s recent efforts (especially on the public relations front) to get ahead of new funding opportunities, such as working directly with NGOs and then maneuvering to have the work published. In an era where the number of assignments is shrinking and our archives are our pensions, finding any way to photograph important stories prior to selling them is intelligent. So likewise getting countries to pay for portrayals of themselves is an interesting idea that just brings this idea to a new level, and shows impressive lateral thinking. The multifaceted distribution is terrific too, from podcasts to an impressive book (so says Colberg, I haven’t seen it in person yet), to an exhibition and interactive website (with maps and breakdown by region in Georgia, which is nice to see). All around, from ideas to photographs to presentation, extremely well done and I think (at this early moment, juries will tell in time) a new landmark in photojournalism.

Thomas Dworzak has a long personal history of working in Georgia, having been (or continuing to be, as the website suggests) based in Tblisi. And maybe because of his close relationship with the country, and the president, his photographs in this project are the most contentious to me. Dworzak presents a love letter to Saakashvili, which is a curious choice given the mix of other work by his colleagues and the nature of the project itself. By all means I’ll defend his right to publish what he feels like but in such a project it is so strange to see this photo-profile of the president traveling the world, wooing its leaders and his domestic successes. The video presentation is especially strange, with lighthearted music, rapid pictures of the smiling president and running tourism-board commentary by Saakashvili himself. As PDN brought up in its piece Magnum on Georgia, For Georgia a “photojournalistic” project about a State funded by that State on the surface is begging for careful scrutiny of its objectivity. There seems to be ample distance between the creative and journalistic freedom of the photographers and their curator Chris Boot from the state itself, and many of the essays and their subject matter probably would not be picked up in tourist literature by Georgia.
Also enlivening from the PDN article is this quote:

According to Dworzak, the project set off some debate within Magnum. “It’s nothing extraordinary, Magnum has done it and other agencies have done it for many other countries, it’s just usually done in a very shitty way,” Dworzak says. That the Georgian government agreed to a completely hands-off approach “made it really easy to accept,” Dworzak relates.

On the other hand, I was blown away by many of the other projects. In some sense this was a narrow assignment, to bring photographers into one country and have them all cover it in their own way, perhaps putting photographers in positions they are not suited for in an obvious time crunch (the book was published roughly a year after the conflict with Russia). But just the opposite has happened, it opened each to do what they do best and it really compounds the impression of contemporary Georgia. As I said above, this project brings together ten unique voices and gives them freedom to search out their own stories and it is a treat to see it come together. I haven’t had a chance to watch through all ten ‘Magnum in Motion’ video presentations but two really have stuck with me, perhaps for obvious reasons.

Alex Majoli has long been an important photographer for me but his work in Georgia, both here and in the recent war, has taken my respect for him to a new level. Please have a look at his piece for this project on Magnum in Motion. From two stark black and white title cards that tie his personal experience (and relationship to music, which is dear to my heart) to his early photography and then straight to the emotions and people he was photographing in Georgia. The soundtrack, from Italian punk band CCCP, provides stark cohesion with the best of movie scores. The images are raw, beautiful and confounding.

Russian photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov provides a similarly personal dispatch from Georgia, with terrific commentary (I believe his words, read by another person). Most of this piece is short video clips, fitting for a man who began his career as a cinematographer and working with Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. And they are ridiculously beautiful, absolutely in Pinkhassov’s ’style’ but in motion. Indeed some of the videos are from scenes that became final photographs for his contribution to the book, such as the one posted alongside here. It is a moving and unique vision, and I can’t recommend strongly enough seeing his work on Magnum in Motion.

And have a look at the Jonas Bendiksen video, you just might spot him having a drink with the people at the party (in another short video clip, again used nicely). Glad to see the photographers getting involved personally!

Another question, which I admit not giving much thought to yet, is the new “Hollywood” film about the war tentatively titled “Georgia”. Wired’s terrific Danger Room blog riffs on an AP story in a post titled One Year Later, Hollywood Re-Fights Georgia-Russia War. What does this other project Georgia-supported project mean for this Magnum work? The film isn’t funded by Georgia it seems but it has gotten state support, and Wired is framing it as pro-Georgia. Does this paint the Magnum Georgia a different hue?

In the end, I think it is a wonderful thing to have such a portrait about a nation in an interesting point of its history, and I of course want to see more projects of this sort of subject matter as well as innovative funding strategies like this. But the final product of Georgian Spring does still leave me with some caution, particularly with Dworzak’s piece included. Maybe it is the newness of this idea, having the subject fund the project themselves, or having potential conflicts of interest so close to the surface (that’s a good thing, but still something new to deal with), but I’m a touch uneasy still. A bold approach, ingenious in many regards, and its bound to ruffle feathers, and I’m happy that it has affected me that way too. Can’t wait to see what is next, and I’m inspired to think about all of these issues anew.

I just got late word that Jonas Bendiksen’s groundbreaking multimedia exhibition for his The Places We Live project is now being exhibited in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. It will be there until November 15, and I really wish I could get there to see it. Jonas showed me hand-made models for this exhibition back in 2007 and I’ve been yearning to see the real deal (room size projection ‘cabinets’ with audio piped in) ever since. Aperture posted about the first unveiling of the exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo when it opened a year or so ago.

Unfortunately, this sounds like the only stop for the exhibition in the States for now and it “will travel next to cities in Europe and Asia.” But in lieu check out again this video of Bendiksen talking about the work (from the beautiful harbor in Oslo!).

The Blue Earth Alliance alerted me a couple of days ago, through their blog post, to this video presentation of John Trotter’s project “The Burden of Memory” put together by the The Dart Center at the University of Washington. This is a remarkable project and presentation that brought me close to tears. Their post says it best:

A few days ago, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma published a video featuring an interview with John regarding a violent attack he suffered in 1997 and the aftermath. This interview details part of the work on a personal project he is conducting, The Burden of Memory. It is a deeply personal interview, which records the events surrounding the event, his ongoing recovery, and his reflections on the experience in conducting this very intimate photographic work.

The video and pictures are incredibly powerful, I urge you to take some time and watch it (about 15 minutes) when you get the chance. My words couldn’t come close to doing justice to Trotter’s words. He has a lot of important conclusions about pictures and photographing that are really enlightening, especially given his position as ‘victim’ and his revelations about what it means for us to photograph trauma and difficult situations. For that reason, I think it is important that all photojournalists, at minimum, watch this. For example, here is just one thing that struck me while watching that I pull-quoted out, this one about life (there are many more):

We’re so used to telling other peoples stories. We’re naturally good at collecting details.
I’d been living my life, then this huge thing happened.
And I didn’t really have enough memory of the event that I could make sense of why my life had changed so much.

At the very end he explains the title of his project, quoting John Berger: “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory”

This reminds of a quote from Ziyah Gafic that I saw in some ‘war photography interviewproject’ (?) which for the life of me (well, literally the last hour I’ve been searching) I cannot find. I’m sure I’ll remember some names or find a link soon after I post so I will update at some point with the link. He was talking about how he takes pictures of things that he doesn’t want to remember. A paradox, but a very intriguing one at the heart of what we do.

As it turns out, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is located across the hall from the newspaper that M. Scott and I used to work at. We actually met there… but that’s another story. The Dart Center is from everything I’ve seen an amazing organization, and it is terrific to see them doing a video presentation like this, and of this quality. I will be checking in with them much more often I am sure.

Congratulations to the new College Photographer of the Year Tim Hussin, announced yesterday from Columbia, MO.

Have a look directly at his work on his website. Hussin is a student of photojournalism in Florida.

Congrats too to all the other winners, including my friend Bill Reeves (website coming soon, he promises me) who won Awards of Excellence in Sports Action and Documentary. Check his work out.

I’m still working through all of the different pictures and projects for my ‘picks’, but one that jumps out at me immediately is Jenn Ackerman’s “Trapped” which won gold in Documentary. Interesting and powerful pictures from inside a Ohio prison.

(Oh, and I won an Award of Excellence in International Picture Story for my Kosovo: New Born project.)

I’ve been trying to put something more substantive together today but I’m just a little too under the gun with my Aftermath Project proposal being due soon and an out of town assignment this weekend for the Fader … so here is a quick roundup of things I’ve been reading and been interested in the last few days, all of which probably deserve a larger post themselves. As a side note: I have GOT to cut down on my RSS intake … you’ll see from the mess of sources I’m giving you today… (Pictures are from my trip to Wenatchee earlier this month)

First, some great great music for you to put on while chewing through all the tribulations of the week. The Elephant Six Collective, which produced such great bands as Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control, and now well-known groups The Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal, is out doing a ‘Holiday Surprise Tour’ around the country. One of the big surprises is that the elusive Jeff Mangum, leader of Neutral Milk Hotel, has shown up and played with his friends. Go here for a full two and a half hour concert: Elephant Six Orchestra on All Songs Considered. (All Songs Considered is rad, if you don’t know it, and they have a great podcast feed). Also, a youtube clip of “Glue” by The Gerbils (!!) performed at SUNY Purchase.

In a great roundup of all the craziness going on around the industry (magazines closing, scaling back, people losing jobs) Whats the Jackanory! tells us to keep our chins up. I’ll try man, I’ll try.

I might be the last photographer to have started following Jörg Colberg on his great blog Conscientious, but I’ve been enjoying it recently. He is making a thought-provoking push for us to reexamine the visual language of photojournalism. And is giving examples here. (Plus today, What is photojournalism anyways?, a brilliant question). I’m very conflicted, and this deserves a lot of thought and consideration and many of its own blog posts. Not least of which is I love the work as it is, it means a lot to me, and that Majoli picture he points to is from a project/book (Leros) that is very important to me and what I know as great work.
You should chime in yourself with some of the discussions going on: Lightstalkers has a thread titled ‘Well someone had to say it sooner or later’ and Alec Soth baits us with “Does photojournalism make you verklempt?” on the Magnum Blog.

On Drinking With A Dead Man John Loomis gives us a nice rundown of where he sources his mailers and portfolio materials in another nice behind-the-scenes business post.

Digital Railroad continues its superheated implosion with news coming from all over the place… I recommend reading the top of Lightstalkers message board for all of the latest. Frankly, whatever I post right now will be old news by time you read it.. this is a fast-moving story. (Newest I have is that web-portfolio house Livebooks, who does my website for example, is also getting in on the fallout and offering deals to switch over from DRR (reports PDN)).

Part of my insanity over my rss-load is coming from my new subscription to insanely productive blogger Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish at The Atlantic. That link is to an angry post that he did about Palin’s medical records; he also provided me with this gem of a link to a blogging 80something woman. Called ‘What was I thinking when I called Sarah Palin a Bitch’. Sullivan came recommended to me by editor of Slate.com David Plotz, through their Gabfest.

I’ve been pretty disappointed with most of the work coming out of Magnum|Insight over the past week, I must admit, but there are some interesting things. Particularly Alessandra Sanguinetti’s work from Los Angeles and, more for the story than pictures, Mikhail Subotzky’s Between Rome and New York.

On the other hand, this is a must see: photographer Alan Chin at McCain/Palin Rally over at BAGNewsnotes. This is a smart photographer, on a very smart blog. (I wrote about him earlier, here).

In other pictures, you really really must also check out Vanessa Winship and her work from the Balkans and Black Sea. More info to come, but we hope to interview Winship soon here on DVA….

Related, take a look at this trove of great videos of lectures/projections over at Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hanover, Germany. I found it searching for Vanessa Winship, but it also includes (maybe not all in English) presentations by Thomas Höpker, Steve McCurry, Antonin Kratochvil, Thomas Dworzak (can’t wait to find the time to watch this one especially), Heidi und Hans-Jürgen Koch and Kai Wiedenhöfer.

Got some more bad news the other day: the National Geographic Society has suspended all grants for the rest of the year, “in efforts to cope with the current economic situation.” I have been in the running for a Young Explorers Grant for my as-yet-publicly-announced Russia project. Maybe in the Spring.. bummer.

I’ve known Jehad Nga’s work for awhile now, and saw some of his pictures at his exhibition at Bonni Benrubi (and direct link), with Paolo Pellegrin, early this summer. But I was alerted to a new story he has done about Somali Pirates called “Pirates, Inc”. (note: unfortunately it is impossible to link directly to his stories on his site, so click on ‘From Here on In-Galleries’ and choose the title of the story). Terrific work, on a story that I’ve been thinking about a little bit. Best of luck to him too at the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass going on soon in Amsterdam. You can see his essay for that on his site too, My Shadow, My Opponent, about boxers in the Kibera slum of Nairobi. Such great color…

Last, in breaking music news, Zach Condon, better known for his group Beirut, will be releasing new music soon, including some surprises (electronic music??). Read this interview over at Pitchfork.

If you’d like more pictures from me, have a look over at the updated ‘Recent Work’ section of my website — www.mattlutton.com.

Endnote: as you can probably see I ended up taking some hours to put this post together … what started as a cop out of an actual post became my procrastination tool. Damn.

My project Homeless in Seattle had some stirring again this weekend, first as a much-tightened version of the exhibition at a fundraiser for my friends at the Seattle-based charity Heroes for the Homeless.

Very nice two-day ‘“Experience” that resulted in a lot of new awareness for the charity and the pictures. And lots of good food and wine (mmm.. duck and foie gras meatballs).

I also late last week received an email from Pete Marovich over at The 37th Frame asking if he could feature my Homeless project on their site. My pleasure, thanks for the opportunity and happy to send more people their way. Great series of links to nice work through that site, check it out.

Another Magnum Blog related post, with a discussion going on chaired by Alec Soth: Should Magnum Do Fashion?

But I think we should go straight to the source: Lise Sarfati: Fashion Magazine

M. Scott has been singing in my ear about her work for years and I’ve definitely come to appreciate her work deeply … something about the process reminds me of Eggleston too. I don’t think it is something like an acquired taste .. it is more you just grow in to knowing how damn good the pictures are.

 

 

Of course, there is a discussion to be had about how she is taking her ‘normal style’ to a fashion project, not to mention the use of nonmodels who have previously appeared in other more documentary Sarfati pictures (for more on this see the blog discussion). I’ve previously complained about Lauren Greenfield’s tendency to do that too. Somehow, though, it feels alright with Sarfati here, probably because these images (and the Magazine itself) are not actually advertisements but closer to art or satire. Or at least I think so (it isn’t marketed as a ‘real’ fashion magazine, I don’t think?).

I strongly believe that one is not ‘better’ than the other. They are different. And I think most photographers should use both, and it should depend on what kind of project they are working on and what they are trying to say. I switch between the two all of the time .. my Kosovo work is shot digitally and my long-running projects on Homelessness and New York City are shot on good old Tri-X film, all in 35mm format.

So, the question is, Which am I going to use for this project?

As I mentioned in this interview with Rachel Hulin for Nerve.com, I try hard to think about which medium I want to work in when starting a new project. To quote from the interview,

“When I shoot black and white things are dark and gritty, very much intentionally, and they compliment and draw things out of the subject matter. As I move forward I am approaching new stories that don’t have this feel to begin with, and it wouldn’t be natural to cloud it under an arbitrary choice of color vs. black and white. I want everything to compliment each other – tones, composition, and everything else. For me, longer and slower stories are ripe for the way I work with film but the faster pieces almost demand we shoot digital. And, for me, digital means color these days, as I’m still trying to get something that looks ‘right’ for me in grayscale (back to that feel that compliments), something that matches or surpasses what I get shooting black and white.”

I was referring there more to the choice between color and black and white, but this more or less amounts to the choice between film and digital for me. I think I’ll always have the mantra hammered into me as an intern at Black Star back in 2005… to paraphrase, ‘If you want it black and white, shoot it black and white!’. Meaning, of course, shooting it ‘right’ the first time, on black and white film. This applies to so much in photography (I also was smacked then in to learning to not crop pictures .. get it right when you click the shutter .. and this has stuck with me remarkably well except for extremely rare circumstances when I break from my rule .. like below on this post!): get it right the first time and don’t rely and get dependent on photoshop ‘fixes’.

As I mentioned rather furtively earlier on DVA, I’m starting work on a new project called ‘Graceland’, about America today and the stories we’re missing or ignoring due to the election cycle and wars. My original thought was that this project had to be shot on film, in color, and in a new format for me, 6×7.

A lot of things went in to this decision … I wanted something that looked new, and stood out from, the work I have done before. I’ve been shooting the color digital (Kosovo) and gritty black and white film (Homeless, I See A Darkness) for awhile, and wanted something that stood out from that work both in ‘feel’ and ‘impact’. I felt a larger negative, in a new perspective and format, would accomplish that. I also was interested in exploring how medium format (which I haven’t shot since ‘05) would change my approach to photographing, and how that would impact how the pictures looked, and were interpreted. I’ve been looking a lot at art-editorial shooters lately (hard to define or give examples off.. think Ziyah Gafic, Mikhael Subotzky, Simon Norfolk, Alec Soth and Alessandra Sanguinetti, amongst so many more) and I wanted to explore. So, I started shooting test rolls on a rented Mamiya 7 and eventually took one to my first real shoots of the project, the Boeing Strike and Lt. Madrazo’s funeral.

Partly as a backup, partly for ‘deadline’ sake (I was thinking of immediate turnaround for news publications), I also shot digital at these events, and it has turned out to be a lucky blessing. After getting my 220 film back and spending time and money getting it scanned, I was rather underwhelmed. Maybe I wasn’t giving it enough time to push myself with a new piece of equipment requiring a different method, but my first few rolls did not have that feel that I was looking for.. that new thing that would really distinguish this project from my other work. There wasn’t hardly anything different between the film and digital except for the format (35mm vs. 6×7). The color, perspective, depth and much more importantly how I was working with the scene were not changed from everything I had done before. Why is that? I can’t really say.

There is more backstory to getting this Graceland project, which I hope to get to at some point, but suffice now to say that it has been a struggle to find funding and outlet for the work. To date, wholly unsuccessful. So when it came time last week to get ready for a shoot in Eastern Washington at an apple orchard I had to decide whether or not it was worth it to continue shooting film (at $35/day rental for the camera, $10/roll (20 pictures) for film plus $11 per roll developing, and 15min per frame to scan) on an unfunded project. Given my apprehension about whether or not this new format was impacting the final product, it was a clearer decision to go strictly with digital. In many ways, I felt I had to: the investment, in time and money, in shooting film was not paying off. An experiment that failed my assumptions, but I must still go forward, as I believe in the story (as M. Scott said after reading a draft of this, he thinks of these debates are concerning ‘packaging, rather than substance’. of course, but the packaging must be considered and utilized to its fullest extent. I quote, paraphrasing again, Paolo at the Oslo Magnum workshop, “We’re photographers. Aesthetics are all we have got”, meaning, I think, that we’re working in visual medium and have to grab our audience in the most efficient and important ways, and that will be done visually)

So, I might have to toss, or crop (something I do only as a final, regrettable resort), some of the medium format frames to fit in to the new edit, but I’ll be able to work more cheaply and certainly quicker. I wish I could have pushed the 6×7 further, and I hope to try it (or square! can’t wait to work with it again) again soon.. probably when I get some funding behind me.

So when I headed out last week to photograph the apple farm and its migrant workers, I only had my digital camera with me, shooting in my ‘normal’ way. “Graceland” will now be some extension of the method of my Kosovo work, for better or worse. We’ll have to wait for a while longer to see how it all looks together. For another post is that crazy process of conception to individual days and shoots to the final production of a story. I’m always amazed at how it works out.

(maybe you could guess, this last picture is a loving nod to my favorite Eugene Richards book, “Americans We”. The best link is to go to his webpage, go to ‘Books’ and click to see the spreads. I hope I can one day accomplish something as important as this book, in the same way that Richards dedicates his book to Robert Frank)

I started writing this post while procrastinating on two of my latest proposal revisions, one for the Pulitzer Center and the other for National Geographic. So far in the last two months I have revised and rewritten at least 5 versions (not including drafts, which probably doubles this number) of a single proposal to do a story in remote Siberia (details withheld for the time being, sorry!).

From the original 8 page manuscript for a major grant at my University to the latest 250 word ‘abstract and distribution plan’ for the Pulitzer people, I’ve had to radically reengage with my ideas about this project and revise my methods for convincing people that this story has to happen. One point I’m making is that if you have to write the proposal a dozen times to a dozen people, maybe something isn’t right the first time!

20 image edit for my website, www.mattlutton.com. My ’standard’ edit of my 2008 story ‘Kosovo: New Born”

Not sure if I’m breaking any new ground for our readers out there (I feel like you’ve already had to deal with this yourself, or that it doesn’t apply to the work you do) but I’ll try. Here are some things I’ve realized about being a freelance documentary photographer trying to do his own stories, by pursuing story ideas and trying to convince publications and editors to take them up. Bear in mind, though, that I haven’t had much success yet..
I’ve been shocked to learn in the last year how much writing is a huge part of this job. Reading and writing, not looking at, shooting or editing pictures, takes up almost all of my time as a photographer. For example, I want to shoot a story in Vancouver, BC. How am I going to get an assignment to do it? I’ve got to convince an editor that the story is important and that they’ve got to send me to do it. The way this is accomplished is putting down the information in a succinct package and submit the story idea as a proposal.

The best advice I think I’ve ever received on how to write these things is from (god, I’m dropping his name again, forgive me) Jonas Bendiksen: paraphrasing, ‘First you have to convince them that this story has to be done. Then that it has to be done right now. Last, that you are the only person that can do it and that you are the one that has to do it.

Seems to work exceedingly well for him, he is one of the few photographers I know who gets by more on stories he wants to do than assignments. And I think it really wouldn’t hurt to take those points to heart for any kind of persuasive writing.

10 image edit of both my 2007 and 2008 Kosovo work for the PhotoLucida Critical Mass which I edited and submitted last week.

As far as (re)editing, it seems similar to the process we have to go through with portfolios. You have to figure out what your goals are with this particular iteration, who the audience is and what requirements (8 pictures? 10? 20?; 250 wds, 500, 2 pages?) you have to meet. As I said at the top, for me, going through these different versions has definitely left me with a firmer (death-hold) grasp on what is most important about the story and what absolutely has to be communicated and what doesn’t. I started with an 8 page ‘report’ on this topic and its relevance to the world and have been forced to cut and cut this until my current 167 word (exact! for Nat Geo) ‘abstract’ of the issue. While this brief certainly doesn’t not have the depth, ‘narrative power’ or nuance that I feel is required by this or any other important issue, I do think it contains enough of the story to convince someone it has to happen.

I had a conversation with a photographer friend last night who was visiting Seattle, and he was relating his current experiences in the freelance market, and he is taking a very different angle on all of this than me. Having to pay rent, on the east coast, he is in the position to having to make money somewhere/somehow with pictures right now (i.e. weddings, PR) and from that security create the freetime to do whatever stories he wants. He is planning to finish some of these projects outright, and then try and find a home for them. What I am doing, for better or worse, is trying to find funding and space for projects at the start. I’ve been focusing on editorial, a very limited market especially when you’re not established, to pay for more editorial. I’ve been trying to do this via ‘good ideas and good photos’ but I haven’t unlocked the key yet. I started this post to try and think through some more of these issues (am I doing things right? am I doing things well?) .. and hopefully get closer to knowing if I need to radically change my approach. Should I just take a day job until I get more established? I’m considering it.

At this point in either of our careers (I think M Scott would agree) doing this as a straight-up editorial (not to mention documentary) shooter this is a tough preposition, but it is what I’m after. Wish me luck, cause I’m still waiting on a break. (Or, as I’ve started calling it, waiting to win the lottery, because I’m positive that it isn’t simply a skill game. some luck is involved).

8 image edit of 2008’s ‘Kosovo: New Born” for the College Photographer of the Year competition

If there is enough interest, I’ll consider posting what the proposal(s) I’ve been writing for my ‘Graceland’ project. Leave a comment and I’ll see if it is worth opening up that can of worms.

PS – I see that Hey, Hot Shot! is now accepting entries for their second round of competition for the year. $60 to enter, but if you are selected you get $500 (whoo…) and what seems like very nice exposure. Maybe even get to participate in 20×200… I like that idea a lot and might even try something similar here..