The Right Thing?

By Siobhan Connally

I thought it would be simple to write an informative piece on photographing children. After all, I do it on a daily basis either professionally or personally. Once I began to write, however, I realized that what I have to offer by way of instruction can be summed up in two sentences: "Get closer" and "Be patient: you may have to try again another day."

A person could starve on that much food for thought.

Photography is so personal an exploration when it comes to portraiture - children or adults - that constant observation is crucial. That lead me to ponder the notion that observation changes the observed, which leads to an inherent moral dilemma - how do we separate the photographer from what's photographed?

Photographers face these moral dilemmas every time they raise their camera at someone who is vulnerable. Whether the vulnerability is the result of age or infirmity, or merely the inability to hold a hand up in front of their face in protest, it matters not. Even when the subject agrees to be photographed, the photographer is not off the hook.

As a fine arts undergraduate on my way to becoming a journalist I met a man who changed my life. He was brilliant and flawed - a paranoid-schizophrenic alcoholic who had been on his way to becoming a physicist when he started hearing voices. By the time I made his acquaintance he was already a person of the steps, a border being living inside the community but ostracized from it. He was walking among us, although people crossed the street to avoid him; worse he was sometimes attacked by people who feared him.

In my senior year, I convinced him to become my subject. He allowed me to photograph him over the course of several weeks, tape record his conversations and combine the images and quotes as I saw fit into a series to show his mental illness and the clarity that I found within it.

I thought I could make difference. I thought I could show my small academic circle what it was like to be an outcast - a real one. For months I photographed him using rudimentary skills, basic equipment and push-processed developing. He did his best to ignore me as I watched his every move. But the understanding I got was not what I set out to find.

Months after my student show closed, and he went back to his existence and I to mine, nothing had changed for him. He was still struggling, still battling foes imagined and real. But I had my degree and heaps of praise from all the "right" people.

I didn't help him. I wasn't his friend. He was a person whose predicament became my grade. Was it worth it to him? I answered for him: No.

There are those who might say that journalism is sacrosanct: that its mission is for the greater good. I agree, and know that there are people who can make the moral justification with little reflection. They just KNOW they are doing the right thing. I was not convinced my skills justified the debate.

I abandoned all plans on becoming the journalist I had envisioned. Instead I became a community newspaper woman. In this capacity I had the distinct pleasure of taking photographs of the people who lived among us when they wanted to be seen. I was at every parade, pancake breakfast, every bake sale and children's play. Of course, none of them were with me in the editing room.

Did they like their expression? I couldn't tell you. They didn't have a choice. It made it simple. I didn't have to please anyone but my own sense of aesthetics. Now that I'm a parent, the decision of when and how to photograph my daughter, and how much I show her off, are issues sending me back into a land of quandary. Often, when I raise my camera, a collective groan trickles through the room. My family loves me, and they compliment my abilities, but they don't always want to indulge my passion for collecting all their moments for posterity. There are times, I am sure, they would rather I take a walk and aim my lens at the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

As I look over the pictures I have collected of my own daughter, the nagging culpability resurfaces. "How is she going to feel when this picture winds up in the high school yearbook," asks my husband, holding up a picture of my ol' dog sniffing her little naked bum.

We balance work and family, but how do we balance parenthood and building a photographic history knowing that histories mix mirth as well as mayhem? Is it worth it to make the distinction for posterity? A screaming child, a troubled grandmother, a father resigned to know that this is life in all its loud, troubled beauty. I took the photograph before I gathered the child up into my arms to comfort her. Sometimes that bothers me.

Looking over the images now I see 'real life' jumping out at me, and wish I had spent more time making magic happen instead. But then grandmother looks over my shoulder and touches my arm and tells me: "You are doing the right thing. She will know her family better than you can imagine through your eyes and observations."