[1948] American documentary photographer
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Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There’s no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed.
The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.
You look at photographs that freeze time, but then time moves.
For a long time I’ve lived with the inadequacy of that frame to tell everything I knew, and I think a lot about what is outside of the frame...
I don’t know what I’m going to come back with. I don’t go with a checklist. Many times I don’t go on assignment. I just go because I feel like whatever it is that’s happening in that particular place is important. It’s about being a witness to it—documenting it and recording it. In the places I’ve chosen to be, over time it becomes more obvious which of those moments are critical.
We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks.
I see myself in the tradition of encounter and witness—a “witness” that sees the photograph as evidence.
I’m deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective—I see myself as only one of many storytellers.
What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people’s instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can't distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.
As a photographer I don't want to look at people as objects. I want to find other entry points to making photographs that bridge a relationship.
Personally, I think of Magnum as a harbor that both protects us and challenges us to be out in the rough and challenging seas.
It’s always more comfortable to be in your cozy home with your friends and close ones but sometimes you just need to venture out to pursue the work that is important to you.
The subject has to want me to be there for me to feel that I can be there.
To make a good portrait, you need to reveal a private moment, which can feel like an act of theft.
So the problem for the photographer remains: how to create images and a sequence that's sustaining and engaging, but asks people to wait, to not think they know, but to be suspended and uncertain along with those pictured whose lives are unpredictable and unraveling.
For me the essence of documentary photography has always had to do with evidence…
Photography Masterclass: Creative Techniques of 100 Great Photographers [Paul Lowe] foreword by Simon Norfolk
If Instagram had been available when I was working in Nicaragua in 1978, I’m sure I would have wanted to use it as a way of reporting directly from the streets during the insurrection.
It’s difficult now to feel that I can’t make an image to bring the devastation of the war with the contras home, even though I feel a tremendous urgency all the time to do so... It’s not that there haven’t been images made, but the larger sense of an “image” has been defined elsewhere—in Washington, and in the press, by the powers that be. I can’t, we can’t, somehow, reframe it.
Looking at contact sheets, it’s a great set of footprints. Either you got it or you didn’t. You could have gotten it, you should’ve moved. I think you’re plagued with that and then suddenly you find a frame and it just seems to be there, it just seems to know itself and sort of reveal itself. That’s the harmony.
Dig in, follow your instincts and trust your curiosity.
It’s a strange experience… the photograph is like an object frozen in time, and people’s lives go on.
What I’ve learned over fifteen years of working in the field is how to create opportunities out of accidents. I’ve learned not to be too fixed on what I was supposed to do, to be flexible, and to perceive moments. Sometimes things don’t fall into place as you had hoped, and you can stay fixed to one idea or you can see something else that might lead you a little bit off the path.
You don't always have to know what you're doing when you're doing it. It's all unpredictable.
A gifted photographer can go someplace and see a world they don’t come from.
A photograph is always a record of a relationship.
...a documentary photographer can cross the line and show that the conflict zone is not just a battleground in a distant land; it is also in our homes, it is self-inflicted, it’s in our heads.
