Michael Freeman’s Creative Paths...
Michael explains why your photographs should be posing more questions than answering them
The huge growth in photography – the numbers of people, the numbers of shots, the quantity published – has had a remarkable impact on the way people judge imagery and on what they expect. The default way of shooting has long been ‘show and tell’. In other words, the camera has a great ability to capture instants, so that’s the way it has mainly been used.
Art photography’s another thing, by definition out on the fringes somewhere, but most of us are out to show things, whether it’s a lovely or exciting landscape, or people – how they look, what they do. This may all sound a bit philosophical to start off with, so excuse me for that, but deep down there’s a basic difference between showing what’s there (elegantly, skilfully, etc, of course) and raising questions, even if it’s only little questions.
In a way, it goes back to the early days of photography, when people were arguing about what photography should really be about, no less than they do today. Around the turn of the century (20th, not this one), pictorial photography was in full flow – created imagery, dreamy style, lots of soft focus, that kind of thing – and of course there was a reaction. It was what American Amateur Photographer termed ‘Straight Photography’ in an article written in 1904. As a result, it was taken up by some of the century’s great US photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Basically, sharp, clear, clean compositions, no messing about, just concentrate on fantastic technique, but don’t mess with the content; a mountain or a sand dune stays a mountain or a sand dune.
The main image is one of my favourite shots for two or three reasons. It’s clean (by my definition), exotic, simple but a bit weird. Anyone can see that these are two figures walking, and the key to that is the moment of one sandalled foot just raised, but they hardly look human. Or perhaps they’re part of some strange ritual which involves dressing up. The other shots, taken before this one, explain it easily, although at the same time take that little bit of magic away; no one really likes things being explained to them that they feel they should have worked out for themselves, like a joke that missed its target. The assignment was one of my first and longest, a threemonth shoot for a book by Time-life on an ethnic hill-dwelling minority, so my affection for the photograph is heavily laced with nostalgia.
I lived in the village and got to know the daily rhythms. This was December, after the rice harvest, so time to get on with things like house re-building. This involved, among other things, collecting imperata grass (a really long kind) from the hills and bringing it back to re-thatch the roofs of the wood-and-bamboo houses. The other shots were pretty good in their own way, and I adored the one of one of the girls, exhausted,
catching her breath while a village dog looks on, The difference is that these other shots shown here explain, while my favourite does the opposite. I suppose I might have called it questioning rather than questionable, but that really means a kind of investigation or inquisitiveness, and here what I’m simply doing is trying to raise a small question in the viewer’s mind.
The publisher, of course, was more interested in telling the story, and chose the horizontal shot of the girl placing a bundle among many others.