Substack is primarily a platform for print, so most of what I publish here is my written work. But that’s not the only work I do. In addition to print reporting, I also make documentary films. I’ve posted a few videos here in the past, but they usually don’t perform particularly well on this platform, and there’s no point in trying to make Substack into something it isn’t. So even now I’ll stick to print in discussing that other, visual side of my professional life.
I’ll talk about filmmaking a bit, but I’m actually more interested in writing about photography right now, for two reasons. First, it’s a hobby I’ve picked up recently (though I now shoot my own video, until just about a year ago, my filmmaking work primarily consisted of production and editing, so I wasn’t constantly carrying a camera around). Second, it’s very different from print reporting as a way of engaging with the world — more different, I would say, than documentary filmmaking is.
I had a professor in graduate school who once described to our social theory seminar how the sociological approach of Erving Goffman differed from that of Émile Durkheim. Durkheim, he explained, like most grand theorists, tried to understand social forces by reading a lot of books and sketching from them a map of social reality. But only an academic goes about trying to understand anything that way. Most people learn by participating in the world, not by observing it. If you moved to a new town, for instance, you probably wouldn’t spend much of your time staring at a map of it, memorizing its features. Instead, you’d drive around, check out the different neighborhoods, see where the parks are, get out of the car, and take a walk around downtown. That’s more analogous to how Goffman did his research.
This isn’t to say that Goffman’s approach is better than Durkheim’s (I adore Durkheim so much that I named my daughter, Emilea, in part after him); it just steered him toward a different perspective. Durkheim’s methodology allowed him to discern the practices and structures that cohere a single society out of many isolated individuals. Goffman enriched this analysis by observing how people, in their daily interactions, generate a working consensus of what constitutes the social reality we all share.
The act of taking pictures has, to me, a relationship to the act of describing the world in print comparable to these two ways of learning. The process of print reporting, at least for me, goes something like this: you go out into the world and you talk to people. If there’s documentary evidence, you review it. You create for yourself a representation of reality: this is what happened and when. From that representation you draw some conclusions or arguments: this event happening in this way shows us that the world is like that. You edit and you publish.
My other paying craft, documentary filmmaking, is somewhat different because so much more of your emphasis is on telling a human story, and because of the physical requirements and constraints of capturing a moving image. But it’s not that different. You’re still creating a representation of reality by recording people’s accounts of the events they live through or by directly filming those experiences. Usually, you’re trying to draw some conclusions or make some arguments about the world. It’s basically print reporting by way of a camera.
Taking a photograph, by contrast, involves none of those things. Yes, you may be capturing a fleeting moment of reality on your camera sensor, but unless you’re a forensic photographer, it’s usually not for fact-finding or expository purposes. People may draw certain conclusions about the world from viewing your image, and they may be conclusions that you want them to draw. But those conclusions aren’t derived from a carefully crafted representation of reality that you painstakingly assembled; they’re from whatever happens to have found its way into the photograph you took. They might even be things you captured by accident, or didn’t realize were there until much later.
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