When Still Photographers Go To Video

Minimata, Japan, by W. Eugene Smith

Long before I started shooting video I shot stills.

I had picked up the skills studying photographer at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., under the great Howie Levitz.

When I graduated from Williams, I received a Watson Foundation Fellowship that allowed me to spend the next three years traveling around the world photographing.

When I moved to video in the 1980s, my background and all my experience was from stills work. In fact, one of the things that frustrated me them most was that most of the TV cameramen I dealt with had little regard for the visual composition of the stories or the power of the image.

I have always had a great attachment to still photography, and so it was with a great degree of sadness that I read the following on EPUK:

Has the time come to take photojournalism off life-support? After nearly 25 years in the business, agency director Neil Burgess steps forward to make the call.

There is no question that photojournalism, as a way to make a living has pretty much ceased to exist for almost everyone.

But now, what does the photojournalist do with their skill set?

In the course of running my training bootcamps, I have come across my fair share of professional photographers trying to make the transition to video.  Most have great eyes. Their problem is in their storytelling skills.  Video, unlike stills, requires more than just the ability to capture great images (and some of these guys are just stellar. The very first VJ I ever trained was David Kennerly, who is certainly world class).

I learned my own video skills and the techniques I teach not from television and film classes, but rather from still photography, Life Magzine, and in particular, the work of W Eugene Smith, the photojournalist who invented the photoessay for Henry Luce at Life.

Many years ago, I came across a book entitled W Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay.

This book published by some of Smith’s best-known photo series: things like Country Doctor or Spanish Village, but then, on the facing page, the book also published Smith’s contact sheets. Now, this is something you hardly ever see, but the contact sheets allowed me to see inside Smith’s brain and understand how he looked at a room and a shooting situation.  Almost without fail, Smith shot in sequences – close up on the hands, on the face, the wide, the over the shoulder – the same sequences I use and teach in the bootcamps.

Because of his sequential shooting Smith was able to construct linear photo essays for Life that told a story.

Life was the most popular magazine the world has ever seen, largely owing to what Smith had invented. It was television before television. But of course, what Smith had also unleashed was the sense of linear and powerful storytelling. And the text helped a lot.

National Geographic is no different, except the photography is a bit less directed as storytelling per se, as opposed to illustrative, and thus the text becomes all the more important.

Great magazines like Life or Nat Geo were weaves of text and photos that worked together to both capture the imagination and deliver a story.

The greatest weakness that great photogs have when they move into the realm of video is that their storytelling skills are weak. They depend far too much on the images (which are quite good) to convey a story. This generally does not work, or if it does, it requires far too much work on the part of the viewer to ‘get’ the concept.

Let me give you an example that came over the transom this week.

http://www.sammorganmoore.com/smmcom/blogger2.asp?blogid=61

This is the work of Sam Morgan Moore, an extremely talented British photographer who is making the transition to video. As you can see, he has a spectacular eye. (And he shoots without a tripod).

Sam sent me his first attempt at telling a story in video.

The shooting, as you can see, is painfully beautiful. As a photographer, Moore at his best is in a class with Smith. But when it comes to ‘telling the story’ Sam has relied on sound bites from the people he has interviewed, laced together as VO to try and drive a kind of narrative here. This does not work.

It does not work because it is disjointed. It doesn’t tell me a story. It doesn’t drive the story along in a compelling way.

If Sam had spent the day at the Sheep farm and then come home to his wife covered in wool clipping, dripping sweat and excited by his experience, she might have said, ‘how was your day?’

And he might have responded, ‘I had one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life today”?

(so far, so good)

And she might say.. “what happened?” leaning in and ready..

And he would then reply, ‘just a second’ and turn on a tape recorder filled with soundbites from people he had interviewed.

How long do you think that would hold his wife’s attention?

A minute? 20 seconds?

How long before she would turn to him and say ‘what the f**k is the matter with you? What happened? Talk to me?”

I have the same feeling watching his film.

Talk to me!

Tell me a story.

Tell me what I am looking at. Who are these people? What’s with the sheep? What’s going on here?

Tell me a story.

The pictures do it great in so far as they go. I might even like to hear a bit from the sheep farmer or his wife or whomever, but first and foremost I need you to TELL ME THE STORY.

This requires narrative.

Just like in Life Magazine with W Eugene Smith and all the other Magnum photographers.

I need the writing.

I need the narrative.

Sam’s video is good in so far as it goes, but it does not go anywhere near far enough.

Video is about pictures, but it is also about writing, text, narrative, music, graphics, editing. It’s a rich tapestry of all these things, all working together.

The pictures he’s got (and I would say the editing also). But what I need her, what the story cries for is a well constructed narrative.

Just putting up the shots and the soundbites and essentially saying ‘OK, I’ve gotten you this far, now your figure it out from here’ is not good enough.

The potential here is enormous.

What he needs is narrative and storytelling that is commensurate with the quality of his shooting.

If he can do that, then he’s really got a winning formula for success.. and just the kind of thing that everyone will want to buy.