midterms

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Stephen Mayes, as found on Notes From Nowhere:

The adherence to formulaic representation suggests a lack of connection with what’s truly meaningful to oneself and the impression is that many photojournalists photograph what they think they ought to photograph rather than what actually intrigues them.

[“Romantic, as in] heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious or idealized” defines photojournalism as represented by the vast majority of the entries. Where is the intimate, the personal and the real?

In the past year in China, I’ve shot two things–subjects that interest me and subjects that I think will interest others.  Inevitably, shooting subjects that I think are marketable, or that people want to see, has produced images that, after an initial honeymoon period, I find distant, one-dimensional, and simply boring.  When I’m shooting subjects that I’m genuinely curious about, without regard for how others might receive them, the resulting images stand up to my own critique over time, and are well received by others.  This dichotomy seems painfullyl obvious now, but it’s something I’ve overlooked for quite some time.

I started thinking about what interests me, what I know, what I’m passionate about.  My day job is as a teacher, often in cramped and stuffy classrooms, full of 5 to 17 year-olds, laboring (or not) to learn this foreign language called English.  Being at the front of the classroom is not conducive to photographing, but last Sunday I found myself administering midterm exams to individual students.  I took the opportunity to make a series of portraits.  I would characterize these as quick and dirty, and far from refined, but I do think they reflect the intimate, the persoanl and the real.