Eyes in the back of my head
On the face of it, the connection between being a teacher and a photographer is not the most obvious one. I could show you dozens of talented photographers who have a professional grounding in graphic design, architecture, fine art, cinematography and you would understand the connection. A visual art. Indeed, there are many times when I have wished I’d had the formal training of any of these fields. Surely, they would be more useful. Each of us is shaped by the experiences we have and can only be who we are. And I am a teacher.
To be precise, I am a Headteacher. My day job sees me in charge of some 360 children in the south east of England. In addition, fifty staff are my responsibility and both adults and children have taught me a lot about people – even if they haven’t taught me the fundamentals of design.
As a street photographer, my images are fundamentally about people. I shoot candid images – never asking permission, never posing my subjects. This requires an understanding of how people are likely to behave. As a teacher, anticipating behaviours, knowing how someone is likely to react, and being empathetic to any given situation, is important if you are going to be successful. Teachers have eyes in the back of their heads. Street photographers need them too. There has to be an understanding of people if you are to anticipate the potential in a scene – when someone will lean in for that kiss; exhale a smoky blast into the cold, blue air; jump a puddle with open umbrella aloft; look up straight into the mouth of the hungry camera?
Being able to anticipate is born out of empathy. We put ourselves in another’s shoes. Good teachers see the world from the point of view of their pupils – understanding what will challenge, excite or frustrate them. If you are unable to see and be fascinated by the world through a child’s eyes, you will never make it as a teacher. I would argue the same for photography.
Children gaze at the world in wonder and in awe – a way of seeing which we, as adults, have often grown too weary to appreciate; too jaundiced or just too busy to see. The best photographers hold onto that ability to view the world through a child’s eyes – finding beauty and wonder in the most common places and everyday occurrences. The brief moment of sunlight and shadow on a wall; the textures in drops of condensation on a steamy bus window; the fleeting coincidence of two people in identical dresses passing on a busy High Street. We have a lot to learn from children and how they see the world with wide-eyed wonder.
We have a lot to learn anyway! And teachers will tell you that there is no better way to improve understanding of something than to teach it. We gain a far better understanding of a concept when we have to explain it – be it multiplying fractions or shooting in aperture priority. Several times a year I work with a small group of children each with a camera and, through really thinking about how to teach them some of the basics, I have developed a far greater understanding of the fundamentals of using a camera.
Of course, a lot of what they do is muck about with the camera – take “silly images” and try all the buttons. Teachers understand the crucial part that play performs in our lives. Play is where children get to try things out and it doesn’t matter if they make mistakes. That is crucial because the greatest learning happens at the point at which mistakes are made - we learn from our mistakes. Children have permission to make mistakes – hey, they’re just kids, they’ll grow out of it. When did you last do something without fear of failing?
As photographers, and as human beings, it’s really important that we hold onto that notion of play. If we do not try new ideas then we will simply repeat what we’ve done before. As artists, it’s very important to experiment and not worry about whether it’s in the latest style, or is going to garner the most likes on whatever social media platform is currently in vogue. Shoot for you, experiment, fail, tweak and go again. Play more. That way you are being true to yourself and that will lead you to develop your own style.
Being true to yourself brings me to my next point – Values. Anyone, who spends even the shortest time with children, will know full well that they quickly learn the Values that are around them – whether the Values are taught explicitly or just absorbed as they are lived out by the adults – (“do as I say, not as I do” – you know which they’ll choose.) Having the right Values is important. I would argue that it’s important to have Values as a photographer too. Let’s take street or documentary photography. Here, Honesty is a key Value. An image must be believable, and it must represent what was there - without airbrushing or clone stamping details. It’s a question of integrity.
Similarly, Respect should be there on the street – while it’s important to honestly document history, it is only right to consider your subject and to treat them with Respect. Consider a homeless person; photographed and displayed on social media, at an exhibition or in a book when they are at their lowest ebb. We have a duty to put ourselves in their shoes. That doesn’t mean there should never be an image of a homeless person (I certainly wouldn’t want to see this aspect of modern life air-brushed out of history as if it never existed - that’s an issue for another discussion). However, there should be a very good reason for making that image. Respect is a key Value when photographing people.
Our Values, of course, are very much shaped by the things that have influenced us over the course of our lives. Ask any photographer about their influences and their eyes will sparkle as they conjure up a much-thumbed mental list of the world’s greatest image makers (Cartier-Bresson, Sergio Larrain, Elliott Erwitt, Alex Webb, Saul Leiter, W. Eugene Smith, Harry Gruyaert, Fred Herzog, Ernst Haas – since you ask; though the list may differ tomorrow). However, I firmly believe that, at the moment we press the shutter, there is far more influencing our decision than just the narrow genre of street photography. And not just photographic either.
If it doesn’t sound too grand a claim, I’d like to say that an image is the sum total of all of the photographer’s life leading up to that moment – every image seen; every film watched; every painting studied; each book read; song heard; statue, building or structure observed. Throughout our lives we retain something of those things that delight, excite, shock and horrify us. And, similarly, we dismiss millions of things that just don’t resonate with us. Whatever we hold on to is carried along as virtual baggage – a very real tool in our photographer’s kitbag. This is the sum of our lives – informing and shaping how we view the world. It makes up the “us” that clicks the shutter. Jay Maisel said it best when he said, “The photograph is not the result of the clicking of the camera, but of all the years of your life up to the moment you take the picture.”
“The photograph is not the result of the clicking of the camera, but of all the years of your life up to the moment you take the picture.”
And, thus, our viewpoint is shaped. But it doesn’t stop there because it affects our decisions (tastes if you like) about camera settings as well as the actual moment when we choose to shoot. It determines our production values after the shot has been taken – colour, black and white, high key, low key, cropped, clone tooled … The list is probably endless. The way we see the world cannot help but be there in our images. And for that reason, our photography says something about each of us as a photographer, just as it tells us about the people we have chosen to show in our images.
This view is highly individual and personalised; born from the jumble of all our experiences. There is no right or wrong. However, it does determine where we find balance on the see-saw which pivots between photography as Art and photography as Science. Should a photograph be a pure and scientifically accurate record of what lies in front of the lens or should it portray a mood, an aesthetic, and tell a story? Personally, I am a storyteller. Growing up in a house where both parents were literary academics how could I fail to be?
An image, to me, is part of story – much like a piece of a jigsaw. Occasionally, there will be other pieces to help flesh out the story but usually that one image is all there is, creating a sense of wonder and triggering questions – what came before, what happens next, how does it end? That’s part of the beauty of it – it says enough without telling everything. And, of course, going back to my day job, stories are how children make sense of the world. No less a street photographer than Tod Papageorge describes photography as a “fiction making medium.” And that’s all right with me.
