Magnum Photographers: What Makes Them Click By Eileen Douglas / The Digital Filmmaker /

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Editor’s Note
In “Magnum Photographers: What Makes Them Click,” journalist, author and filmmaker, Eileen Douglas has the second of three parts about why Magnum photographers shoot photos, who they are and where they come from, and why the camera and photography are central in their lives. Douglas bases her essays on the book, “Magnum Stories” published by Phaidon. Douglas calls October’s essay “Personal Need.” In November, Douglas will discuss how photography allows for the freedom to create, thus the title of that essay is, “Creative Freedom.”

Eileen Douglas

Magnum co-founder ROBERT CAPA, by his own account, admits photography allowed him to escape the poverty and anti-Semitism of Central Europe, as well as the suffocating control of employers. As we celebrate the anniversary of Magnum at 60, we find, like Capa, many of the Magnum photographers who shared their insights in the book “Magnum Stories” have a deeply personal reason for making their way through life with a camera in their hands.

Eugene Richards writes, “I was profoundly shy when I was young—a little fat boy—and the camera was a good choice because it was self-healing. By its very nature, it forced me into contact with other people.”

Many other Magnum photographers have something similarly revealing and moving to say.

RENE BURRI tells us, “I wanted to join those guys who traveled the world and brought back pictures.” Burri relates a story from the days when he was at military school. As he aspired to be a photographer, he was always taking pictures. Suddenly someone asked him, “What are you doing taking pictures?” He was taken to the Commander. He thought he was being arrested, but instead the Commander said, “Great! I want you to keep at it.” “I learned then the power of the camera,” he says -- “how it could allow me to move around, poke my nose into things where otherwise I would not be allowed. Photography was going to be my ticket across the Alps and out of Switzerland. Taking up photography was a way of establishing myself in life.” And so it was.

MARTINE FRANCK writes, “I was painfully shy as a young girl, but through the experience of traveling I realized photography was a way of being present, of being involved in a situation. I remember the first photographs I took were of a wedding to which I was invited. I was very ill at ease with people in social situations, and I realized that if I photographed I wouldn’t have to chat. I’d have a function. Photography became a way of expressing myself, but something more too. It was the solution to a problem about how to be -- how to live, to exist.”
Franck doesn’t like short-term subjects. Photography for her isn’t jumping in and out of something quickly, but over a period of time building up a sense of belonging somewhere. “I like to stay with a subject and keep returning to it. That probably relates to the question of how to exist that I needed to work out. That’s what photography is for: connecting with people and communities.” With it a once painfully shy girl can say, “I’ve built strong friendships.”

RAYMOND DEPARDON was born on a farm in a rural area of France. “I could have taken over my parents’ farm or found a job close to home. That’s what my mother wanted. It hurt me a bit not to be able to make them (his parents) happy by taking over the farm”... but he had other dreams. By personality, he was quite the opposite of the roving reporter discovering the world. Introspective as a boy, “I didn’t say much.” The only farmer’s child in his school, “I mixed with the children from town. I got a bit of a complex about it, and I had feelings of resistance and anger.” With no hint of art among his family or his ancestors, he was alone in an alien world where he wanted to prove something. First he took pictures of his world -- farm animals, friends, school football matches, his parents. Determined to see Louis Armstrong when he came to Lyons, 30 kilometers away, “I sneaked away, with hardly any money, and I managed to get close to the stage to take photographs. So the first thing about photography was that it made me feel like I existed. People said, ‘Can you show me your photos?’ and that gave me strength despite my shyness and inhibition.”

Depardon has no idea where the passion for photography came from. “I think photography was inside me. Once I found it, it became stronger than me and I took refuge in it. It was something vital, like breathing or eating. It gave me an identity and a way to express my curiosity. It felt at the time like photography belonged to me alone. It was the world I was happy in.”

Photojournalism allowed Depardon -- and us through him -- to look at far-flung places -- Biafra, Israel, Chile. It also allowed him—and us -- to look beyond ourselves.
And, eventually, after he’d seen the world, he returned to photograph the farm and its life.

DAVID ALAN HARVEY had polio when he was six years old. He remembers, “While I was in the hospital, I told myself: If you get out of here, you’ve got to really live your life! It’s a lot of work living the life that you want to live, but that’s what I’m doing.” This is the way he wants to live his life, following his muse, making pictures. ”My life is full of all kinds of conflict, like anyone else’s, but I have been hell-bent to live it the way I want.”
“When I’m actually shooting, when it’s at its best, it’s all raw and instinctive, and wonderful, and passionate.”

HARRY GRUYAERT I think of photography like therapy. It’s something I need to do. If I don’t take pictures for a month, I really miss it. It’s a relationship to the world I need, a distance: it’s being more present and somehow less present.

CHIEN-CHI CHANG, a poor kid from Taiwan, dreamed of seeing New York’s Chinatown for himself. Articulating his own outsider experience, at first the pictures he took there were purely for himself. He had no deadline, no editor, no compromises to make. “It was just me, slowly discovering the rhythm of Chinatown. It was a lyrical experience.” He did it, not as a social mission, but because he needed to do it. As a practical matter, it allowed him to build a major body of work. One, perhaps, no one else could have gotten as he was less of an outsider than someone not Chinese. Yet, he says, “All the main bodies of work I’ve done represent what I’m concerned about. They all involve expressing part of me.” Growing up in Taiwan there was a clash of cultures. Something he finds strange, almost surreal. He wants to express that. He explains, “I am asking: What’s going on here? How come? What I’m looking for is a total experience, and on a subject that I feel I need to address. I live photography, and if something bothers me or bewilders me or confuses me for long enough, then I feel I have to do something about it.” With photography. “I guess I want to be less bothered. Something bothers you until you do something about it, and taking pictures is what I do.”

THOMAS DWORZAK states it boldly. It wasn’t about photography when he started. ”Photography was the pretext to get out of a stinky Bavarian village and travel. For me photography is about the opportunity to go places where things are happening, and about the moment in which they do.” At first, it was more like, “OK, something is happening. I want to go there. I want to see it. I want to smell it. And the way I saw what was happening was in pictures, so I got a camera and took photographs. Photography was the best excuse to be somewhere, and take part in something.”
Dworzak, who covered the war in Grozny, the uprising in Haiti, says, “In the end, I wouldn’t get up in the morning if I didn’t think in some way I wasn’t able to do something for history. That’s the big excuse for photojournalists, and one I think that is totally fair. You might not do the people you are photographing any good, and it’s not going to change anything, but somebody has to make a record of it.”
And the drive “didn’t come out of thinking I might get a few pages in some French magazine. It’s always been curiosity that drives me. I like the fact that I am not in control, that the photographs are what happens, rather than the result only of the decisions I take. You could say that’s the downside of photography, but it’s also why it is magic. Now it has gained more importance for me -- I want to be good at it and all that -- but I am still grateful every day that photography allows me to go places and look at what’s happening.”

BRUCE DAVIDSON is working out his fears. “Most of my photography that becomes a unified body of work involves penetrating a world or a space that I fear or that I don’t know or to which I’m attracted. “I think when I work best, I’m looking around and I’m exploring and I’m hunting.” Looking not for a story, but for emotional truth. Exploring different vantage points. Broken inner cities, for example. As with his discovery that “the subways of New York and the people on it gave him something.” Davidson stumbled onto his subway project while heading elsewhere. He was in a depression. And the subways were graphiti-covered, desecrated, in a depression. Stigmatized as being a great beast. But as he worked below ground … fascinated by the color in particular … he discovered within the great beast there was also a great beauty. “I had only to explore it.” He saw as he approached people for permission to photograph that “you can have a 10 minute encounter in a subway that is so intense.” He was at home down there.
“I think what drives me is an awareness of the essential loneliness of man---we are alone when we’re born, we’re alone when we die—and it’s that fundamental quality of isolation, together with feelings of love, that compels me to use the camera the way I do. Although I never wanted to change the world with photography, I did want to change myself, and I used it as a vehicle to uncover feelings that were buried deep within me. Somehow I was using the camera to make connections.”

ELI REED grew up in the projects in New Jersey. While young, he saw the work of famous photographers. “These were big influences on me. My guide in a way was Edward Steichen’s book The Family of Man, the way it allowed you to look inside other families all over the world.” He thought, “That’s the world I’m stuck in. I was in awe of the power of images, and it gave me a mission.” Happy in the beginning just to be working as a newspaper photographer … ”doing what I loved and getting paid for it,” photography has, in fact, taken him out into the bigger world, to places like Lebanon and beyond. To Reed, “documentary photography is about coming to terms with the world and the things that you see, by photographing them. It’s what you record during your walk on the planet Earth. The main thing for me is that I’m happy I’ve been able to work as a professional photographer. What’s at the core of my work is, in essence, a meditation on being a human being.”

GUEORGUI PINKHASSOV grew up in the Soviet Union. He realized as a boy in school that a camera is a magic wand that can give you freedom. Living in the Soviet Union, a closed society, there was so much to witness. “I didn’t want to photograph the street, to intrude on strangers’ lives. I preferred to be an introvert, eyes turned inward. But change decided otherwise.”

Best for someone raised in dictatorship has been to see what arises spontaneously on its own. “I prefer not to refuse assignments. You never know what awaits you. Surprises that I have encountered on some less glamorous jobs have only confirmed that I was right to take them. I’ve had quite a few surprises. Good photos have come when I least controlled the situation. The process reminds me more of fishing than it does of shooting. I look through the lens; I create my composition -- banal, boring. Get tired, get distracted -- click, and success. As though the photographic angels, upon whom it all depends, had begged, “Don’t look through the lens, let us work in peace.”
“But the editing is mine. Whoever controls the editing of a photograph controls his fate.”

DONOVAN WYLIE, brought up in Belfast in the 70s and 80s during the conflict,
“got my first camera in 1981 when I was 10 and my bike was stolen. My grandparents were very upset about it and sent me 30 pounds, but instead of replacing the bike I bought a camera. At first the idea of being a photographer was more attractive than the actual business of taking pictures. The idea of photography seemed to come together with the idea that this is how I could be -- someone who could have one step in the world while at the same time being one step removed from it.”
Citing a man in his picture sample who is a bit of a loner, as is he, he realizes now how back then he would “look for subjects that evoked something that represent my own sense of how I felt.”
And there was social entrée, the excuse of the camera to be with the people he wanted to be with and live, as did the people in his photos. He explains, “I approached a group of New Age travelers in England and hung out with them. The work was simple and genuine -- I wanted to be there -- and I got close to people. I made friends. Maybe if I hadn’t had photography, I would have been living exactly as they were.“
“Taking photographs is a way of understanding myself and the world and time I live in.”

NIKOS ECONOMOPOULOS needs to establish a connection. “I photograph because it’s my way of life. For example, I find it impossible to participate in a normal way when I go out on a Friday or Saturday night to a party, but when I participate through the camera, I feel fine. I have fun when I’m there with the camera so I don’t need to drink or dance.”

Economopoulos, who covered the Balkans conflict “because it was his own part of the world, and trying to understand it became an obsession, photographs places “with my feelings; even places that are very poor, or very remote, make me feel good. They are places where I feel something really authentic in the atmosphere. Authenticity makes me happy and it gives me the ability to make good pictures. That is the kind of contact that makes me happy.” And it is happiness he is looking for. “Even when describing poverty or suffering in a place, I might be happy there. Not happy because people are suffering, but because I connect with the situation and this connection is real. It is this kind of communication that makes me happy.”
As with the Balkans, or going to Turkey as a Greek, it was not important to cover the war, but to come to understand the people. “I know more now than when I started that work. I feel more at peace because I know more, and I feel much better.”

FERDINANDO SCIANNA admits, “I’ve never understood why I chose photography. If I were able to say, then I’d probably be able to answer many other questions about my life. Chance. A way of escaping from my family and a conventional life. Vanity. Because I started taking photos and showing them to my classmates, and they said, ‘Cool! Do one for me too!’ The seduction of photography. An interest in things going on around me—life, people, working-class protests. Nervousness. My personality. But above all I think photography was a way of saying “No” to my conditioning. With it, I left Sicily.”
Scianna sees himself as a storyteller, someone looking at the human condition. “What is life anyway? It is chaos, and you try to find moments of sense in it.”
He thinks we all use photography to answer the questions: “Who am I?” “Where do I come from?” and also, for him, “Does the past exist?” The idea of stopping time. For example, he thinks he started recording life in Sicily—“a family album of my home and my village, in subconscious recognition that everything would change, that it would be impossible to come back” to life there as it once was. At least he would preserve a record.
There is also a love of creative freedom. Scianna believes there are two kinds of photographs. “The kind you find and the kind you prepare.” For the kind you find, you have to be receptive. “The work I most like to do involves making the decision whether to turn right or left as you leave the hotel—making decisions in the moment.” And he also believes a photograph is not created by the photographer. What the photographer does is simply receive. What he does is just open a little window and capture it. The world writes itself on his film.

LEONARD FREED believed photography is ultimately about finding out who you are. “Basically, all the projects I’ve chosen are to psychoanalyze myself -- to find out who I am in relationship to other people. If I photograph black people, or Germans, or Jews, or artists, I’m trying to work out my relationship to them. In a way all my work is about my identity in relation to other people. It’s a process where at a certain point you have the answer, and you recognize everything from then on is redundant and there’s no need to do any more. That’s when the work is finished.”

Photography also appeals because it opens doors. “When I say I would like to take some photographs, I’m invited into all kinds of homes, even into people’s personal affairs.“ He relishes the story of going to John D. Rockefeller III’s country estate. Rockefeller asks him how Freed wants him to pose, and Freed demonstrates, relaxing with his feet on Rockefeller’s table. “I thought: here I am, this working-class kid coming to John D. Rockefeller III, symbol of U.S. capitalism, and I have my feet on his good table, and I’m telling him what to do.”

At first Freed wanted to be a painter, but artists starve, and he wanted to make money, to travel and be free. But he does want to make photographs the way a painter makes a painting, so you recognize the hand of the maker. “You don’t go to Picasso and say, ‘Paint me this way.’ You go to Picasso and you accept whatever he paints.”

PATRICK ZACHMANN chooses projects “to learn something.” Particularly about himself. He made a series of photos of African people from Mali living in France as immigrants, for example, not only because he wanted to learn about them, but also because being an immigrant is part of his own story. For him photography is a chance to explore identity and memory. “I am pushed by curiosity… more than that, necessity -- to understand people, understand their cultures, understand social contradictions. Each piece is a puzzle. I never know what or where the end point will be. I am questioning the identity of others to better understand myself.”

Zackmann says “I became a photographer because I had no memory. I can remember very little from my birth until I was 22 years old. My memory starts from the moment, when I was 22, that I became a photographer. At that time he was politically involved, and “my motivation for being a photographer was a mixture of wanting to change the world alongside feelings of trying to understand myself and the world. He wanted to get rid of the hurt, the negative feelings involved for him in being Jewish.”

He talks of a time when “I photographed my mother with her two sisters and while she was looking at me, through my camera, I had the feeling that I was looking at her for the first time.” This in a family rocked by the Holocaust. Through photography, eventually, he says he did reach a kind of peace about his own identity.

ELLIOTT ERWITT got into photography because it seemed like a good way to make a living. It could have been that or it could have been refrigerator repair. “It wasn’t really photography that I was attracted to, but the possibility of working for myself and being independent. That’s always been my guiding spirit.” One of the reasons he’s a freelancer is because “you can get in and out of things quickly.” Most interesting to him was not being assigned, but “just reacting to what you saw.”

“I just go out and look around and take pictures of what appeals to me. What I do is carry my camera around, here in New York, or when I am off on a commercial assignment. I see something and I go “click.” The best things happen because you just happen to be somewhere with a camera.”

“I don’t get up in the morning and say, “I’m going to be funny today” and lots of my pictures aren’t funny. It’s about reacting to what you see. It’s really nothing more than that. A photograph is a reaction to what you can see and what you can organize within a frame. Sometimes you see lots of things. Other times you’re not switched on and you don’t see anything. I’m still trying to find out what I’m doing with photography.”
“I’ve found it a thoroughly worthwhile way to spend my existence.”

BRUNO BARBEY, like many of the others, says, “I started taking pictures as an 18 year old, with the desire to have human contact, to travel, to engage with different cultures—to express my sensibility.” More at home with images than with words, he was “reluctant to express myself in text”…but felt he’d found himself when he had a camera in his hands. He did Vogue portraits of the people he wanted to meet…writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers. The camera was an entry passport. Also a ticket to ride. With it, he went places he wanted to go, “It was very seductive to be asked to go off somewhere on the other side of the world. I went to do stories in Cambodia, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, India, Argentina. Chile.”
But what he likes best to do is his personal work.

He says he cannot explain why he is drawn to Morocco, the place of his birth. Then he cites the excitement of being there, the colors. The people who do not like to be photographed, and the patience it takes to wait for a shot where people do not realize any photo has been taken. For him, the game in Morocco is one he enjoys. Sneaking back, merging into the walls. Photos must be taken swiftly with all the attendant risks or only after long periods of infinite patience. Yes, it’s the game in Morocco that he enjoys. In his words, “You have to be a fox!”

So, lastly, is the idea of the game of it. Creativity. Artistic freedom. To stretch yourself in exploration. A chance to be curious. To play with that curiosity. And to see where it leads. We will look at that next month in Magnum Photographers: What Makes Them Click, Part Three.
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Eileen Douglas is a broadcast journalist-turned-independent documentary filmmaker. Former 1010 WINS New York anchor/reporter and correspondent for ABC TV's "Lifetime Magazine," she is the author of "Rachel and the Upside Down Heart," and co-producer of the films "My Grandfather's House" and "Luboml: My Heart Remembers." She can be reached at www.douglas-steinman.com.