Trampoline and Towers, Alexandria, LA
A photographer is assigned the task to photograph a particular place, be it Louisiana Highway 1 (all 450 miles of it) or the western arrowhead tip of Kentucky, known as the Jackson Purchase, or simply East Saint Louis, Illinois, a town of 27,000 in an entrenched state of economic depression. She grabs her camera bag, drives to her destination, stops and points her camera at . . . what? What does she photograph to adequately capture the “place” she has been assigned to study? Her choices of what to shoot – the shot selection – will largely dictate how viewers come to see the photographed place, both literally and figuratively, and so before a single choice of composition or exposure is made, shot selection irretrievably determines what the resulting narrative will be.
Knowing this, a photographer must carefully select shots that capture elements that visually define place. In broad terms, places are visually defined by their geography, and by their constituent collections of things and people. In this blog post, we will discuss the photographer’s shot choices focused on the geography and things of a place. We will save a discussion on photographing the people – a rather large topic in and of itself – for a later day.
We can start the discussion of shot selection with geography. Every place exists against the backdrop of its physical geography and is inexorably shaped by it, in both form and complexion. A seaside town, for instance, is attached at the hip to the ocean, and the shoreline is as physically inescapable as is the sky. The town’s contours are dictated in substantial part by this relationship, yielding the familiar scenes of sandy beaches and dune-terminated streets. The seaside town’s character, like its physical appearance, is also shaped by its proximity to the ocean. It is reflected in the street names, businesses and infrastructure. Beyond seaside towns, the stamp of geography similarly imprints places linked to deserts and prairies, mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, as well as those associated with specific geographic landmarks, such as Seattle’s Mount Rainier and Central California’s Sequoia National Forest. Physically and culturally, place reflects geography, and a photographer of place must capture that relationship.
Bait Boat on the Bayou Lafourche, Cut Off, LA
Second on our list of place defining features are the things contained within them. Unlike natural geography, the things that shape a place are less obvious and more variable. “Things” include buildings and infrastructure, as well as objects, both the intentional (those placed into and existing in the environment with purpose) and the incidental (those that result from the day-to-day interaction of people with place: spent and exhausted items, mundane debris shed from daily life, mislaid personal effects, traces of erstwhile individuals). With this wide ranging array of the things of place, where does the photographer start?
One obvious starting point in this realm – at least for places inhabited by humans – is buildings, the houses, shops, offices and factories, to name a few, that constitute cities and towns. But which buildings, taken as a set, adequately reveal a place? Even on a single residential street, a photographer must decide which and how many houses to photograph. Below are two such photographs showing a pair of houses separated by a single block. If the subject “place” was this block, which photograph better captures it? The obvious answer is neither one nor the other, but instead both. So perhaps our analysis yields a simple rule, which is, perhaps “when photographing a place, photograph both houses.” Or perhaps it is “photograph all houses.” Surely the former makes no sense, but the latter?
House and American Flag Art, Fort Smith, AR
House and Discarded Sofas, Fort Smith, AR
On a single block, a “photograph all houses” rule might seem workable, but expanded in scope beyond the single street and the proposition quickly grows unwieldy. Which and how many buildings does a photographer photograph to capture a larger area? Photographing every building would quickly grow into repetitive, mindless monotony, which would later overwhelm a viewer. The exercise would thus be, for all practical purposes, useless. Even if a committed (and perhaps commitable) workforce could theoretically accomplish such a ponderous task (and indeed, around 1940, the New York City Department of Taxation, in conjunction with the federal Works Progress Administration, did just that), and further if a determined photophile could absorb the resulting set, the result would be less than optimal. So the answer, as far as buildings go, is definitely not “photograph all buildings”; it must be “photograph some”, leaving the photographer with the unavoidable responsibility of selecting which buildings to photograph. Shot selection as unavoidable task.
Beyond the buildings, place is further defined by the objects it contains. A photographer is thus faced with still more shot selection, this time, in the realm of the “objects of place”.
The “objects of place” run from the mundane – the vehicles and trash cans, shopping carts and doorways – to the expressive – the public artwork and statuary, the signs, banners and flags – to the incidental – the discarded brick-a-brac and rundown detritus of place. Collectively, these are the mystical tea leaves of place, signs through which an astute viewer may divine a more profound sense of place.
Inside Johnston City Food Shop, Johnston City, IL
But like photographing buildings, photographing an entire population of objects is onerous and undesirable. Again, the photographer must continuously decide which of the tens, hundreds, thousands of the intentional and incidental objects best convey the sense of the place. Does she focus on the intentional objects, because they convey the active will and wishes of a population, or does she focus on the incidental, because the unavoidable residuum of day to day life conveys something more subtle, something deeper, about the place? Clearly, just as no place can be adequately captured in the image of a single building, neither can it be captured in an image of single family of things, and so the photographer must again engage in careful shot selection.
Time and time again, the photographer must choose what is essential to a place and what is subsidiary, and thus what to include and what to exclude from her photographs . Her decisions — informed by her inherent biases, her status as visitor and her life experiences — are indelibly imprinted on the resulting narrative of place. We will discuss at greater length all of these issues, and other aspects of capturing place, in future blog posts.