In Being There Part 1 I bewailed the trend of gear collectors and people who buy classic cameras to take pictures of their cat and their back garden. Now it’s time to get on and talk about the photographer as the documenter.
Photography has many angles to it but one of the most interesting is the documentary photographer. Documentary work, at its most basic, can be deeply personal like pictures of your family over time but at its peak can scale up to changes of your own environment, your town and the people that inhabit it over time. At its core, documentary work captures moments in time, characters and events.
Documentary photography serves a valuable purpose – it acts as a time vault for later generations to see the past, how people lived, the clothes they wore, the foods they ate and much else besides providing a valuable glimpse for future generations.
The work of documentary photography may take years to compile the shots so it’s critical if this is your area of interest that you run multiple projects and keep these in mind every time you are out with your camera. Currently I am running a whole batch of projects and I don’t expect to have a completed folio in much less than 5 years of any of them. My current projects cover people’s relationships to their smartphones, the plight of the homeless, and my local area and its street life but I also do mini projects like the current film revival. Anything can be grist for the mill.
Documentary work is painstaking, you need to compile the shots over a long period of time, structure the pictures to tell stories and of course keep everything catalogued. It’s also helpful if you can chat with the subjects and get a bit of back story to add some colour and depth to the photographs or at least some history behind what’s going on in the picture. This is the basis of a photo essay. It all takes time to do but can be very rewarding. Patience is elixir of this kind of work. Both of my main projects have been running for almost 3 years and I am still far away from a completed folio.
Will anyone ever see your work or care? Well one can never know whether the work is valuable. Only time can truly tell and very often photographs are lost and then found again revealing a glimpse of life in a bygone age. Only a few years ago a huge cache of negatives was found showing peasant life in Russia in the 1920s and these provide valuable insights into life, customs and work at the time. Personally, I do this kind of thing because it provides a solid focus and stops me wasting film if I know I am looking for particular shots. It doesn’t stop me taking pictures of other interesting shots but it does provide some structure to my shooting.
If your nervous about photographing people for this kind of work you either have to find the raw nerve and ‘front’, develop a charming demeanour or learn how to be invisible. I use a combination of all three. Sometimes I will just rush in take the picture and retreat if the person looks like they will be hostile, sometimes a smile and a ‘Hi’ will get them smiling and then you can show them the camera and see how they react and other times for candids you need to be invisible. Keep the camera out of sight, pre focus and meter and then just snap or alternately ‘long lens’ them. When working in foreign climes its generally best to adopt the ‘show the camera’ approach because local sensibilities can be very different. You also need some consideration about local conditions. In some environments you will be using a camera that represents 5 years wages to the local population so a good chunk of empathy and understanding is needed as to local sensitivities.
Getting it ‘natural’ is also a challenge when photographing people for documentary work. Anyone who has owned a camera for more than a week will realise that when you photograph people they tend to ‘freeze’, they go rigid and ‘unnatural’ and the art is to make it look like everyday life. You can adopt the approaches I mentioned but you can also just chat with people, keep the camera in view and your eye in but don’t be shooting. Just let them get used to the camera being there and eventually in a few minutes they will relax and forget the camera is even there and that’s when you start shooting. It’s a tricky act to keep a conversation flow going while working with a camera and it really only comes from experience and knowing your camera well enough to be able to run yourself in ‘Auto’ mode.
Eugene Smith used this approach in his photo essay ‘A Country Doctor’ for Time Life. He spent a month going around with the doctor and shooting an empty camera to acclimatise people to his presence and the camera and if you want to see excellent documentary photography you could do worse than look up Eugene Smith’s work. Mentioning Eugene Smith it’s the perfect example of photography not being about the gear but about the ability. So many amateur photographers are more obsessed about the hardware than they are about actually taking good pictures. Eugene’s Minamata series is amazing and mostly shot with quite low end cameras by todays standards. I have purposely not added what kit was used to each of the photos in this article in a probably hopeless attempt to stop gear-heads thinking the camera is what makes the pics and then rushing out to buy the same camera. Trust me they were all shot on pretty basic vintage cameras using very far from top end lenses – mostly a standard 50mm lens.
One of the most beautiful pieces of documentary work I have seen recently comes from Chuck Fong. Chuck has spent an immense amount of time documenting the American Diner and has published a book called ‘Dinor Bleu – The Vanishing American Diner’ which is a rich tapestry of this vanishing piece of Americana. The photographs are beautiful and cover a huge range of styles that give you a generous portion of the slice of life (and a good dose of inspiration too!). It’s this kind of work that gives a real insight into a whole sub-culture as well as providing some very beautiful images and Chuck has used a wide variety of styles. If you are looking for inspiration to get a project going then Chucks work should light a fuse under you.
I was most inspired in my own documentary work by National Geographic pictures of locations and their rich coverage of places, people and events. We cant all be afforded that capability but a solid project need not take you too far or, like Chucks work on American Diners, can be done over an extended period of time.
Even a humble holiday can yield results, don’t snap away at the local landmarks along with the other grockles, get one or two positioning shots and then look for the small stuff and the local people to add colour and context. I mentioned in Part 1 of ‘Being There’ that travel will almost always provide better opportunities. You don’t have to go to Outer Mongolia but you can spend a long weekend somewhere looking for, and getting, pictures for far less than the latest gizmo.
I use holidays and breaks as a kind of mini documentary. I’ll get some landscapes and picture postcard stuff but I’ll really be looking for the stories in a place.
A solid project in mind like a documentary set of pictures will push your skills, keep you focused, keep you out of the comfort zone and hopefully improve your photography.
Go away now and aim to get some pictures that really pop in 2025. It’s never too late to make a New Years resolution so make yours about getting some good shots.
Picture at the top of the article was a Beijing street shot with a Lumix TZ80, converted to black and white and post processed for contrast adjustment. Shot ‘on the fly’ so as not to spook the subjects.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
