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Eileen Douglas |
Editors Note
In ‘Magnum Photographers: What Makes Them Click,” journalist,
author and filmmaker, Eileen Douglas has the third of her three parts
about why Magnum photographers shoot photos, who they are and where
they come from, and why cameras and photography are central to their
lives. She calls this piece “Creative Freedom.” Douglas based her
essays on the book “Magnum Stories” published by Phaidon. Here in her
November essay she discusses how photography allows for the freedom to
create. As usual, she allows the photographers to speak for
themselves.
For some, it is the
game of it.
Magnum co-founder HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON has classic words to describe
the game. “You must be on the alert. Sometimes you alight upon the
picture in seconds. It might also require hours or days. There is no
standard plan, no pattern from which to work. You must always be on
the alert with the brain, the eye, the heart, and have a suppleness of
body. Sometimes you have the feeling that you have already taken the
strongest possible picture of a particular situation or scene;
nevertheless, you find yourself compulsively shooting, because you
cannot be sure in advance exactly how the situation, the scene, is
going to unfold. You must stay with the scene, just in case the
elements of the situation shoot off from the core again.”
This creativity, this play, is what he calls the reciprocal process
between two worlds, our inner and the world around us. “I believe
that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made
concurrently with the discovery of the world around us…and its coming
together … using the camera … forms a single world … and it is this
world that we must communicate. “
So do other Magnum photographers.
CREATIVE FREEDOM
LUC DELAHAYE feels, “There is a sense of freedom attached to the
camera. You take this object and it makes you walk. It makes you act
in the world. What’s important is the act of ‘being there.’” The
importance of the act of photographing itself. The physical
involvement, ”the moves I make and the risks I sometimes take -- I see
this as an art performance in its own right … the energy that I
transmit to inside the frame of the image is projected from the scene
of the event, the playground. I run and stop, stay still and start
again: unconscious or absent. I have a need, an ability, to become
transparent and non-existent. I am not using photography. I want to be
used by photography.”
Photography, he believes, “can also save you. I am extremely grateful
to photography.”
(Editor's note: Luc Delahaye resigned from Magnum
in 2004)
DENNIS STOCK never follows the news of the day, but searches out “my
own stories based on what enlightens me, what helps me grow, what
gives me spiritual insight -- in short, what I love. It’s like writing
music. A photo essay is essentially like a composer’s variations on a
theme.” He is always pushing the envelop, asking “Is there one more
thing I can say?”
Then “there are moments of evaluation as you sit at the light box or
with the contact sheets, looking at the pictures calmly. It’s
different if there is the pressure of an assignment or the pressure of
economic circumstances, but the best thing is to approach the subject
with enough time to penetrate it without extraneous interference. It’s
an organic process, and you just let it happen.
His goal is to find harmony.
“It’s important not to be rigid, not to walk away, if the subject
doesn’t conform to your preconceptions. It’s essential to allow a
process of discovery to take place. In the best circumstances, it
makes your heart race.”
It is also important to take as long as the subject needs. “Sometimes
I needed the recognition of a magazine to get my foot in the door, but
the majority of my best work has been done entirely on my own. Your
concern is to go out there and discover, to the best of your ability,
and that’s the fundamental drive of all of this.”
ALEX WEBB says, “Photography like mine is an exploration. I work
intuitively and respond immediately to things without full rational
comprehension.” Rationalization often doesn’t come until later in
editing. “I always leave open the possibility of pure photographic
discovery.” Asked to do what he does best, he will poke around the
streets with a camera. Often he just wanders.
“I work during certain hours of the day much more than others. There’s
a sense of magic to the light in the early morning and in particular
the late afternoon that’s very special and palpable. It’s when the
street comes alive. I might use the middle of the day to poke around
somewhere new, but when the light is good I always make sure I am
somewhere where I think there is the possibility of photographs. But
beyond that I often just wander, and let the experience of
photographing draw me in different directions. If I hear that
something is going on, I may wander over, but I might get detained
somewhere on the way if I find something else intriguing. Every once
in a while you get lucky and you’re able to take advantage of what the
world presents you. You try and stack your cards, but a lot of the
time, surprising and good things happen that don’t have anything to do
with any of your expectations or any effort to be in the right place.
And yet, each little decision you made led up to that.”
To be out in the world, working on his own terms. “I feel that’s what
I was made to do.”
To a certain extent “what I do is play with the world, but it’s
disciplined play.” And, as a creative person, he keeps pushing.
CARL DE KEYZER works differently from most Magnum photographers. He
stages reality images … from the past, or art history references. He
says, “Like many other things in life, the game involves exerting a
kind of control over a situation. When it works best, it’s like you’re
inventing something, or you’ve seen a situation that nobody else has
seen, and that makes you feel unique for a moment.” And it’s a game
you can use all your skills to play. Sometimes you’re in a situation
and things are happening around you and you are in a state of perfect
happiness. The rest is just putting a frame around it.”
JEAN GAUMY also likes the game. Like many Magnum photographers, he
wants to be free, to turn to the right or the left depending on what
he wants. Not to be told what or how to shoot.
When he’s shooting, he likes “to anticipate the moment before the
climax and then pounce. To be quiet, but with his nerves exposed, with
‘all my antennae out.’ The best thing, when you are so involved in
your story, is that it releases energy. It’s rare to be in this state,
but it is like falling in love. What I like, too, is to push my body:
to exhaust myself: to pay, in a way.”
Curious, he also likes also to be out of the pack. Not where everybody
else is. What’s important is “to break familiar patterns.” For him,
“Making pictures is partly a question of stopping time; putting it
harmoniously in a frame. We are collectors of time. It is partly a
matter of snatching something from the anguish of death. (At least for
me, he says, it is like this.) OK, you can say that photographs are
about the world, and for sure they are, but my pictures are also a
collection of things I felt at the time. I do not have a good memory
and I am afraid that I don’t remember what I did three or four years
ago. When I look at my contact sheets, I am naively reassured. It’s
very important for me to know: I did this. I felt that.”
“There are some other reasons for what I do: to be with the other, to
make a link to the other, to explore the possibility of seeing things
through other people: to enrich my point of view.” But as for the
creative rush, he makes an analogy. “When I am fishing, and when I see
the little fly on the river, and instinctively I see that the salmon
or the trout is going for it, it’s a fraction of a second, the TAK!
You are like a child receiving a gift from the depth of the water.
Making a good picture is the same thing. It is not something that
happens in the brain, but in the stomach. It is an emotion.”
THOMAS HOEPKER was fascinated as a boy by a camera his grandfather
gave him, and spellbound by printing and the magic of photography. He
always knew it would be photojournalism. “Photojournalism is all about
being curious, and going out and seeing what happens. I always enjoy
that first morning when you are in a country you’ve never been to
before. It’s a moment of discovery and it’s very exciting. You’re
curious and you’ve no idea what may happen.”
Then there’s what happens when he looks at the work. “Sometimes I’d
come home and the end result would be the opposite of what I was
trying to achieve.” And that, in itself, is a discovery.
DAVID HURN writes, “Photography for me is an extension of my
curiosity. All good photography is an extension of something that you
already love doing. I suspect that the best photographers of plants
are at heart botanists who decide to expand their interest in plants
by taking photographs, and the best architectural photographers know
all about architecture. Good photography is generally an extension of
the photographer’s personality. If you show me 12 pictures by anyone
of stature, I’ll tell you who took them. We’re talking about a box
with a hole in the front, so how is it that somehow people can put
that box in a certain place and press the button at a certain moment,
and end up with something that’s distinctively their own. It’s not
logical. It’s the miracle of photography.”
Hurn began his love of photography when he went to Sandhurst, the
royal military training college. Life was highly restrictive. You were
only allowed out once every two weeks, but Hurn discovered “if you
joined the photographic society, the darkrooms were in a place where
it was easy to get into the local town. I took up photography just to
get out. And then I discovered that photography allowed me the excuse
to poke my nose into whatever I became interested in.”
The thing about photography, he finds, is that the photographer really
has only two basic controls: where you stand; and when you press the
button. From the invention of photography it’s never changed. It
doesn’t matter whether you are talking about wet-plate or dry-plate,
or when the introduction of 35 mm cameras made photography more
flexible. Basically, those two decisions are what photography is
about. “In this respect, photography depends on the photographer
having a personal point of view and being clear in his mind about what
he’s trying to do. If you are clear about that, then where you stand
and when you press the button take care of themselves.”
RICHARD KALVAR loved “just walking around taking photographs.” He went
to Europe and traveled around, hitchhiking, and “that’s when I really
started taking photographs. I loved the freedom to do what you want in
the photograph. The original impulse is emotion. But also in the act
of photographing, you’re trying to figure out what’s going on around
you. At the same time you have to react very quickly to things without
really thinking. Somehow there are flows, and you have to feel the
flow and react to the things that are happening between people.
Suddenly things may click. Your heart is essential. I’m framed and
guided by my intelligence, but I’m trying to let myself go. When the
pictures are good, the heart is engaged.”
JOSEF KOUDELKA needed something to feel he could keep growing. He had
been an aircraft designer, but after seven years felt he couldn’t go
further. He realized he had reached his limit. To continue as he was
“would have only meant waiting for death.”
To keep growing, photography fit the bill. Wanting to go further, he
says of photography, “I feel that I haven’t yet got to the end, there
is still something more I can do.” Furthermore, “I know who I am. I
don’t do what I do in order to make somebody like me, or to prove
something to someone, or to be the best. I do it for myself, for my
own satisfaction. I want to find my limits, to see how far I can go.
The maximum, that’s what’s always interested me -- the maximum from me
and the maximum from others.”
GUY LE QUERREC finds “It’s a surprise to me that I should have ever
wanted to do photography, because by temperament I’m an extrovert. For
someone that takes so much pleasure in the boisterousness of talk,
it’s a surprise to me that I chose a silent discipline! But then
again, photography is an open window. It creates opportunities for all
sorts of relationships.”
“When I was nine or 10 I reorganized all my family’s photograph albums
into chronological stories, so that I could find out who my
grandfathers and grandmothers and uncles and aunts really were. I put
together little notes to go with the new sequences I had made. As I
got older, I became progressively more curious about and less
intimidated by the world, so that soon I was able to say to myself :
now I can continue and expand this album, the chronicle, in new
directions.”
Le Querrec photographs those with whom he feels intimate, those who
make him dream, and the places where he feels safe. He makes a strong
connection to the jazz music he also loves. “Listening to jazz…and
accepting its uncertainty, its unpredictability, its ephemerality. It
challenges me to remain in a state of improvisation. I accept reality
as a score in front of me that I’m trying to play, to improvise upon.”
HIROJI KUBOTA was fascinated by the Magnum photographers he met when
he was an assistant to a photographer the Magnum photographers would
visit in Japan. “Rene Burri, Burt Glinn, Elliott Erwitt. Those guys!
They really fascinated me.” Raised in Japan, he was “astonished by how
freely they, as outsiders, could function and make contacts. How did
they know? I was a shy young Japanese man among these attractive
characters, leading such exciting lives. So I decided to be a
photographer.”
Thus, for over 40 years now he has been observing things with his
camera.
“I never photograph anything if I am disturbed by it. I am very glad
that there are photojournalists who are showing what human beings are
doing to each other, covering war and suffering, although I personally
believe pictures hardly ever present atrocities. When I was a child in
Japan during World War II, I saw too many dead bodies. I refuse to
photograph those kinds of subjects. In a way I would prefer to be a
postcard photographer. I love beautiful things, and I want to make
pictures that lift people’s spirits.”
CONSTANTINE MANOS is an American of Greek descent. Driven by curiosity
about who “I was and where my parents were from, …in my late twenties
I went to Greece to find my roots and do a book of photographs.” He
finds it “easy to take good pictures, difficult to take very good
pictures, and almost impossible to take great pictures.”
He has come to realize that a successful picture is a surprise,
something we have never seen before and will never see again. And
being surprised is what he is after. “I am looking to be surprised so
I put myself in situations that will generate a surprise. I spend a
lot of time watching and waiting. The shooting is always done in the
late part of the afternoon when the light and the color are right and
I go back to places again and again. But there’s always the element of
change; that something strange or surprising will happen. When I find
the right situation I work it, watching initially, and then when I
think the ingredients have fallen into place, I might shoot 12 or 15
frames.”
And then it’s over.
STEVE McCURRY finds “Photography, like life, is an adventure, and if
you’re not having a good time, if you’re not learning things and
engaged, then your vision is likely to be flat. The main thing is to
be engaged—fascinated, stimulated, and curious.“
He chose to do his Buddhism photos, for example, a long-term story for
him, because “I found photographing Buddhists in Burma very calming,
as well as visually interesting and challenging. I though it would be
a wonderful subject to concentrate on –conveying the beauty and
serenity of the Buddhist way of life. I love being in Buddhist
environments—the vibe and the energy are so positive.”
He goes places like Mongolia, for example, to experience fascinating
places. The camera is, in fact, an excuse. “I am happy to go to
Mongolia, or Tibet, even without a camera.”
MARC RIBOUD says, “Really I just photographed anything that struck
me.”
When he was a young man, he was terribly shy. He went to London on
Capa’s recommendation …“and took thousands of pictures.” And that is
what he has done since,
… in China ... in India, he has continued doing what he loves to do,
walking alone, looking at the surface of things.
Rarely does he plan anything in his life. “I follow my instincts and I
love surprises, both in my life and in my photography. We have an
expression in French which means to move close to the ground. This is
what I do. I walk with a small camera. I keep looking -- looking at
and scrutinizing the things around me. I wander around a city, or a
place. I notice, and sometimes photograph, apparently insignificant
details. It fascinates me -- it’s an obsession. I am a collector of
instants and details. Instinctively, I feel that good photographs come
from being surprised. And how can someone foresee or plan a surprise?”
PAOLO PELLEGRIN. ”I find that the most interesting images that I
produce are sometimes the result of a process that goes beyond any
ability to control the outcome. So much of what I do is defined by the
rational, but at some point you go beyond it to a different extreme.
There’s a point you can reach, perhaps because of exhaustion, or after
a long period of concentration, where your usual control systems are
bypassed. And you just are. You are in a situation with a camera, and
suddenly snap! You connect, without looking, without thinking. That’s
a moment of joy, a miracle. It’s a gift that photography sometimes
offers -- a moment of truth where you’re utterly yourself, when you
are just there.”
George Rodger once asked, ”How can one explain something which comes
from deep inside?” True, it does come from deep inside. At the end of
the day, however, some Magnum photographers do not need a deep
explanation. They have the simplest of reasons. Because being a
photographer just simply works for them.
CHRIS STEELE-PERKINS works in conflict zones. Often in the Third
World. He believes, “Being a traveling photojournalist is utterly
remarkable, the idea that you can travel the world and you can enter
people’s lives and the most extraordinary situations that are so far
removed from your own normal experience and in some way share in and
in some way communicate that experience to others.”
But he always thought of photojournalism as a tool -- it was “a way to
get there, to be there, to experience a place. The places that
interested me were completely different from the safe, relatively
middle class England of my upbringing and to be able to insert myself
into different societies in a meaningful way because of having a
camera and film was fantastic. Photojournalism was … a toolkit that
allowed me to explore the Third World in an effective way. In the
developed world I don‘t need that type of framework so much.”
“You ask me what is most important, the photographs or the experience?
It is the experience. Living is what it is all about. They photographs
are the icing on the cake. If they all vanished tomorrow it would not
change the fact that I have lived an incredible and privileged life in
which photography has opened up many remarkable opportunities.”
ERICH LESSING sounds a similar note. He has been taking pictures
“since I got my first camera at the age of 13, but always as a
sideline to the business of living. I can manage without photography.
It’s a tool, and I use it when I want to, but I’m looking at the world
through my eyes and not through a viewfinder. Photography is a great
asset. As Capa always said, with it you can roam the world, do what
you like and get paid for it.”
He found it “a great asset for exploring politics and the world, and
later on a great asset for exploring the world of art. It is still a
great entry ticket.” He cites being in the Louvre, free, off hours
when it’s closed to the public, to see and have the staff show him
even stuff in the vaults. “It’s a great privilege.”
Of Magnum in the early days. “We didn’t care about prints or
exhibitions. We just wanted the pictures to be printed in magazines
and to be seen. In the end the relationships we formed with each other
and with the people we photographed were much more important than
stories or pictures.”
ALEX MAJOLI comes from Ravenna, a harbor town. For his personal
pictures, that is his first choice place to be. He writes, “I work in
other harbor towns, and I feel good there. I need the sea. I like the
people living in these places.”
Beyond that he keeps it simple.
“I ask myself why it is that I take pictures of news events or war.
Actually, I don’t find an answer. I don’t find answers to any of the
big questions, like, “Why we are here?” The more I start to read
books, the more and more I’m confused. So let’s put it this way: I’m
Alex. I’m a photographer. I’m taking pictures. I like taking pictures.
I can relate to these big events and I want to record what’s going on
in the time I’m living. I don’t have a social mission. If I was not a
photographer I might be a drug addict. I don’t feel like I am the main
guy who is telling everyone what’s going on in Afghanistan or
wherever. The BBC is doing that. But I think we do need memories, and
I am happy to have a role in contributing to that. And to have the
chance to see and engage with part of what’s going on in the world. I
consider myself a lucky guy.”
STUART FRANKLIN considers himself privileged to be a witness and
observer.
BRUCE GILDEN, hooked in college when he saw an image that he had made
come up, sums it up. “Photography is the one thing that has kept my
life going. It’s something I do passionately and I have always stuck
with. You have to have that passion or you can’t take good pictures.”
In “Magnum Stories” we have been privileged to hear the wisdom and
insight with which these accomplished photographers have explained to
us what makes them “click.” You don’t have to be a Magnum
photographer, of course, to possess this spirit.
For sharing that wisdom, and insight, thank you. And “Congratulations
to Magnum at 60.”
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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.
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