Authorship in the Current Media Landscape

VIEWPOINT & AUTHORIAL VOICE

- Laia, you have completed several projects focusing on women issues since you started working as a photographer, covering lesbian love, asexuality, eating disorders, abortion, and trauma among other things. Now we are in middle of awakening in regards to the women’s rights movement, but how did you persevere all these years and stick to your topics?

LA: I did not get up one day and think to myself: I am going to base my whole career on the struggle for women’s rights. When I started it was much more intuitive. I wanted to tell stories close to me, that I could understand, document and eventually (as I am doing now) transform and interpret. It often felt like a “calling”. I am able to explain things that not many people know of or explain them from a privileged point of view that give me a certain responsibility. My intention to shed light on the uncomfortable and the hidden, and make those things more digestible, has become my way of working.

I am personally happy to see changes in society regarding these issues. Now, we have to be careful, women’s rights are not to be addressed temporarily. As they say, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Awareness needs to be integrated and built into real change. In A History Of Misogyny, I try to show that change it is not something that is reached “and that’s it” — we have to keep the momentum, otherwise we’ll end up going backwards.

- Adam, you worked as crew on a sailboat in the Caribbean and Mediterranean to fund your first photographic projects. How did you find your way to what you wanted to say specifically as a storyteller?

AF: My intentions as a storyteller change from project to project. As a younger photographer, much of my process was bogged down in making sense of the craft and learning to navigate a professional landscape. In many ways, I was bluffing my way through assignments, trying to make sense of geopolitical dynamics in Asia and the Middle East, and at the same time as using photography, which is an inherently limited medium, to make a statement. There has been a sense of freedom that has come with being established, now all I have to worry about is telling the story.

- Rena, you came into documentary photography with a self-initiated and deeply personal project on the current state of your home country, Azerbaijan — the consequences of the oil boom, the conflict in the region and the toll that the post-Soviet changes have taken on the people. How did you find your stories and your voice?

RE: I took my first photographs in 2001 in the neighborhood next to my home in Baku that was undergoing major urban transformation. Historic courtyards and homes were razed to accommodate the oil fueled construction boom raging in the city and forever changing its face. Instinctively, I set out to document these changes, as it was happening right on my doorstep. At the same time, I was photographing the industrial landscapes on the periphery of Baku: sprawling turn of the century oil fields left-over from the Soviet-era oil exploration, neglected lakes of petroleum mixed with garbage where noxious fumes rose into the atmosphere. These two stories became the first chapters in my long-term project on the human cost of oil. In the years to come I followed the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline across Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to document the socio-economic impact of this multi-billion dollar project on the region, especially the vulnerable communities of people living in its direct vicinity. I managed to sustain this long term project with the Getty Images Editorial grant, as well as a few magazine publications, until I finally published the monograph of this work. I realized that the publication of the monograph was a powerful platform in itself for showcasing the work internationally: along came interviews with the mainstream media, exhibitions around the world, more magazine publications and a TV documentary.

- Zack, you have been working fluently between stills and film for years now and you found your thing pretty early on by making a personal project on California, with your film collaborator Drea Cooper. What did the success of this shorts series teach you about positioning yourself as an author?

ZC: I’m better at doing my thing than someone else’s thing. I enjoy making the work that I’m passionate about. Assignment work often doesn’t line up that way so I self assign. A lot of self assignments. A lot of exploring stories I think might be interesting. California is a place was the first long form version of that model and the thing I’m most proud of is that it was in our voice.

At the heart of this thing we all do is our voice. In a bloated documentary world, my voice is the thing that I have to trust … so, yes, authorship matters to me.

THE VALUE OF PERSONAL TAKE

- When did you realize that your subjective take on the story and deep understanding of the context have value in the current media landscape? Have you been hired specifically because of your long-term projects?

AF: Once I was professionally comfortable with working editorially, there was room for my own voice to emerge more. I think this was part of me maturing more than something dictated by clients. My clients have always given me the room to explore and be authentic.

When I look back over my career, I was too inexperienced and naive to actually realize that I had the freedom to call it or tell it how I saw it. Now, it seems the more I infuse personal style or voice into my work the better it is received. In the current state of photography, the only currency I have is my authorship.

ZC: I’m a better photographer when I know the place and the landscape and the players and the language. Parachuting into a story that is brand new to me isn’t ideal and I’ve found I can be of much more service to the story and to the current media landscape by focusing my energy on a place or a theme. Flint was the right fit for me at the time and I tried to maximize my work there. After years of working in that area, I know how to operate. And I think the work reflects that. It’s personal. It’s about a place I care about and want to see if I can play a role in its recovery.

RE: I began to receive regular editorial commissions after the publication of my first book. I was asked to embark on stories that traced history rather than depicted current events. When I look back on many of my assignments I realize that I often photograph people and things that are no longer there. I have to find a way to visualize the invisible, just like the oil pipeline, buried 10 meters underground, yet its presence is felt strongly above ground.

While visualizing the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in India I traced his ghost across the Indian subcontinent in my attempts to put flesh and bones on his dreams and ideas. In Chernobyl I focused on still life images — victuals, household items, relics of the disaster to portray the long-term effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, as well as nature’s ability to thrive with life, not long after destruction. Even during the Georgia-Russia War (2008) rather than focusing on the fast pace of unfolding events, I photographed interiors of abandoned, shelled homes in a tenement buildings bombed by Russian warplanes. Which objects were taken and which were left behind when the people fled the shelling? What survived the blasts? Love letters, ghost frames, kitchen paraphernalia piled up with corrugated metal and blasted cement. For me those empty interiors with things that were not there, were very evocative in their articulation of the fear and loss of war.

Last year in Siberia I was asked to photograph a story about the only man in Russia who took legal action against Joseph Stalin for the murder of his great grand father in the NKVD purges of the Great Terror. Most protagonists of this story have long been dead or gone, the places are buried with layers of history, almost untraceable. I enjoy this kind of challenge. It makes my brain work in a different way, looking for visual clues everywhere.

PLACING YOUR WORK AND NAVIGATING PLATFORMS

- Where do you position yourself strategically in the media landscape? Which platforms and audiences are crucial for you to make your work meaningful?

LA: I still feel strong resistance from the market about the stories I make. For me finding corners, strategies and holes in which to deliver these stories in doses, is part of the work itself. The feeling of breaking barriers and going against the current does not just disappear. I always have the reader, the visitor, and their experience in mind while … and how they are consuming my work. Without an audience (a recipient) no exchange is created.

I am the daughter of the generation that saw the fall of the traditional editorial system. That was happening as I was on the verge of becoming a professional in that system myself! It was a necessity to manage platforms and different languages. In my case, it was a blessing. I am much more interested in the platforms crossing over, since they mix targets. The worlds of communication and art merge, the realities overlap, and through all this new possibilities are opening for the artist and experiences are enriched for the audience.

AF: The more personal I make a story I think the more valuable it is. We live in a post-documentary photography world, the only real contribution now is to go deep, to spend time with subjects, to have an opinion. I hope through a strong sense of bias my work will mean something. I definitely do not subscribe to the neutral observer school of thought.

But having said that, my work primarily exists as journalism in an editorial context. My ultimate contribution is images that reach a mainstream audience through traditional media platforms. The most significant work I have done was made on assignment for Time Magazine, The New York Times and National Geographic. My ideology is contradictory to one of traditional photojournalism, which is ironic.

RE: In addition to photography, for me writing is an essential tool. One needs to articulate their purpose and motivation for applying for grants and writing pitches and do so with both clarity and passion.

I write copious notes when I am photographing and the beauty of it is that in writing you can describe the photographs you did not manage to get. As a photographer I am not omnipotent, I am not able to capture every microscopic emotion and the mood of every single moment unfolding in front of me, but this does not mean that my eye takes a break when I don’t photograph. The eye still works, as I can capture these moments in writing, those that I missed with my camera. This is where the two mediums harmonize.

I recently directed an experimental non-fiction short film in Spirit Lake, North Dakota. I wanted to capture the sounds of the place, the voices of the people, and the movement of the landscape, be it ripples on the lake or the wind blowing through a field of grass. People responded to the video interviews with raw emotions sharing with me their testimonies of abuse. I felt that in Spirit Lake, the voices needed to be heard. There are ways to weave stills and videos harmoniously into one visual narrative that is powerful and effective.