making pictures

My camera and I have been in some pretty sad situations together. I have made pictures at the sites of several former Nazi concentration camps in Central Europe and pictures of my mother dying. I have found myself imposing a frame around faces at AIDS orphanages in Uganda and those tearfully staring at the remains of the twin towers in New York City. The work I’ve been doing at Operation Breakthrough has been heart wrenching as well.

People have asked me from time to time how I can get it together to raise the camera to my eye and concentrate on making an image at a time when I should be crying my eyes out. I’ve thought about that a lot. All I know for sure is that using the camera can do two things for me: remove me from the scene and bring me closer to the scene.

Photographing my mother as she died made it seem less real for me, but also shook me and forced me to really look at what was happening.

One day last week I went with a young woman to the cemetery to make pictures of her at the grave of her brother. He had been killed on the streets of Kansas City, gunned down while walking home one day. This young woman, a teenager, told me that her family had been able to raise enough money to bury her brother, but not to put a head stone at the burial site. Since I was supposed to photograph her where he was buried, she wanted to make sure that was where she was standing. But if there is no head stone or marker of any kind, that’s kind of hard to do. She explained to me that shortly after he died, she had crafted a marker herself, had dug a small hole in the ground and had placed it just where she thought the coffin had gone into the ground. The groundskeeper at the cemetery had removed it, though. So, the only way she can find the right spot these days is to feel around on the ground for the indentation that was left by the home made marker.

Now I must say I was pretty stoic while listening to the story of the murder and the funeral and the hand made marker – after all, I had a job to do and that was to make photographs. Remove myself from the situation…

But as I watched through the viewfinder as this young woman kicked the ground, trying desperately to find where her brother was with the toe of her grubby sneaker, getting angrier and more frustrated by the minute, it finally got to me. Bring me closer to the situation…

There is always that moment when it does eventually get to me. Usually, though, it’s after the fact. I remember finally breaking down in the darkroom, as I was rocking an image of shoes from Auschwitz in my tray of developer.

I guess I had removed myself from them when I was there, concentrating on the correct shutter and film speed I needed to use in order to make the proper exposure.

Then I guess I got closer to them as I stood there in the glow of the darkroom red light noticing for the first time the shapes and sizes and styles of the shoes, the seemingly infinite number of them, the sadness left behind in them.

Fighting back tears that afternoon last week at the cemetery really caught me off guard.