The story of the Girl and the Photograph

"Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection...the lovers, the dreamers, and me" - Kermit the Frog

Then began The Project (capital T, capital P, for humor). Suddenly, it seemed to me that the idea that I had myself written up and proposed several months ago was disarming; me, it’s own creator, the gall! In any case, faced with the prospect of actually speaking to complete strangers, convincing them to pose for me (and with each other) and then somehow making the already artificial situation at least a bit more organic, I could not help but become, well, panicked. It was a bit disconcerting walking around the streets of Cape Town, even the familiar ones, asking at random if people would let me photograph them; quite honestly, it was humbling in only the way that surprise life-lessons can be. I knew there could only be one feasible solution, which was to get over it and get on with it. And so, now my photography project is underway and I am more comfortable walking around with a lens.

It occurs to me that the camera’s role in my case is somewhat paradoxical: it brings me further away from my subject. Without the camera between us, my subjects and I are identical in that we are human, we thin and exist, and at this particular moment in our respective lives, we coincide in the same physical spot on this planet. However, as soon as the camera lens is raised to shield my face, it does just that – it separates, shields, creates a distinct contrast. In short, it defines, and in doing so, it limits. I become the photographer; they, my subjects. We each have distinct responsibilities and demands to/of each other (although yes, in this relationship my demands are greater) and those become concrete when I don my camera. In my role, I am no longer the same as the person I am photographing, our interactions are now limited by the simple fact that we are further away and that my camera has, quite literally, shed light onto this divide. Even if we talk, and even if that interaction is completely routine, my subject and I are still separated by the very instrument that is meant to bring me closer to them!

In any case, as I go about doing this project, it also occurs to me how oversimplified and somewhat impossible my proposal actually was. I came here with the intention of capturing a whole range of human emotion by asking strangers to pose together and my goal was to show some kind of shared humanity…but now I realize that the most I can hope for (and the most I have a right to show to an audience) is much simpler than that: it’s just people. At some point in this process I removed my goals and started just taking photos of strangers for the sake of putting two human beings in a single shot and finding some way of doing each of them justice in the resulting image. It seems alarmingly simple, but it is incredibly difficult; at least it has been, for me, to represent honestly and without affectation what two complete strangers might look like standing next to each other without stripping them of their individuality. Every once in a while, I take a photo that actually works, and those are the moments that have been worth it! Just yesterday, for example, I photographed Daniel and Edward. Daniel is a 23 year-old lanky skater who was skating with a group of friends by the Company Gardens and Edward is a toothless, homeless man who happened to be walking in the aforementioned Gardens. The first thing of notice about the photo is (and Barthes so handily defined this for us as the studium of a photograph) that there is a black poor person sitting next to an average looking white man; the cliché of bi-racial photos, especially in a country like South Africa, almost destroys the photo entirely by making it trivial and commonplace, predictable….but then (at least to my eye) you notice Edward and Daniel’s faces. The latter is almost entirely at ease…in some photographs, his hands rest loosely on his propped skateboard, in others, he is leaning back….but every once in a while (sometimes when he looks at the camera, sometimes when he looks away), there is a slight expression of uncertainty mixed with the serenity of his eyes. And then, there is Edward who sits, entirely erect, hands in lap, barely shifting at all the entire time, and whose face is contorted as if he were experiencing extreme pain. It is not a look of discomfort, or disgust, or confusion – it is a look of pain and protest. (I should mention that I talked to Edward during the entire process of taking a photograph and he assured me that he agreed to have this photograph taken). These two very different people are made interesting by their dramatically different emotional responses to their shared moment. In the end, they remain individuals even though I have subjected them to an artificial grouping; they are triumphant over my awkward project and, in being so, are the very reason the project is any good!! A bit ironic, yes, but a little irony never hurt anybody. That is (as Barthes would say) the punctum of those photographs for me, and that is the reason this project has been worth it.