Creative: Working a Scene

I was fortunate. I started my photography life with a degree in photojournalism. This meant lots of rules and lots of people yelling at me. This meant an instant “F” if I made a grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistake that was covered in the AP Stylebook. (I wouldn’t last five minutes today.) This meant shooting under pressure, on assignment, from the second day of starting my education. I first shot for The Ranger, the student newspaper at San Antonio College, a paper that won a ton of awards and was consistently one of the best student newspapers in the country. I eventually moved from San Antonio to Austin where I entered the photojounalism program at UT. It was in Austin I began shooting for The Daily Texan, another legendary paper that has turned out many a famous photographer. (I won photographer of the semester during my first run at the paper. This meant exactly nothing in the grande scheme.)

In San Antonio I won my first photography award, garnering a second or third place in the Photo-Essay category with a story about my friend Sean who had cerebral palsy but was learning to walk for the first time. I spent weeks with Sean, on my own time, outside of school. She was a warrior and the images were easy because she was doing all the work. Upon returning to school I had to then face the photo editor and the director of the journalism program before I could move on. This was not a paddy-cake session of touchy-feely goodness. This was real critique. What I endured would certainly get these people fired today, but I am SO thankful for the experience.

My colleagues and instructors didn’t mince words. There was no time for mincing words. We were on deadline, each and every day. There was no list of excuses to explain subpar performance. “Oh, I don’t work well in this environment.” “Oh, I don’t make good work if others are around.” “Oh, I wasn’t feeling it.” There were people who tried this but they didn’t last long and certainly didn’t shoot more assignments for the paper. It was sink or swim. Jerry, the head of the department in San Antonio, is responsible for my career. Jerry saw something in me and cracked open the door, just an inch or so. I took the bait and then he began treating me like I was a new recruit. It was photo bootcamp. I’m not really sure he had any other option. Nice wouldn’t have worked. I was a stupid kid. We all were. Nice would have resulted in subpar. Forceful was required and that was what we got.

I would return from shoots and the photo editor would be waiting. And remember, this was not just a barrier of subject matter, peak action moments and storytelling ability, this was about things like exposure. Poor exposures meant more time in the darkroom which meant less that superb prints and the potential of a missed deadline which was basically the end of your student newspaper career. There is no other way of describing this experience. It was stressful. I can remember using pure bleach with a paintbrush to dodge of the eyes of a little girl who I had photographed at a homeless shelter. She was backlit and I blew the exposure by at least a stop. Jerry came into the darkroom and said “You blew it.” “Come on man, there is no excuse for this,” and then he grabbed the paint brush and showed me how to layer then rinse the bleach, stopping the brush before you went to far then fixing the print to hold things in place. His sense of disappointment was palpable and it haunted me for days.

One of the major takeaways of this period was “work the scene.”

One of the most glaring differences I see between working professional documentary photographers and the consumers/prosumers I see attempting to do this work is the extent to which the professionals work a scene. Many of the consumer/prosumers I see simply dabble in scenes as opposed to attacking a scene relentlessly until it has been completely exhausted. Many non-professionals stand too far back, work far too slowly, take too long to compose and focus and then leave a scene long before they have extinguished the possibilities.

Working as a student journalist remedied this for me because when I didn’t work a scene hard enough I heard about it. After graduation, I moved on to working in the journalism world. For over a year I attempted to secure an internship at a newspaper. I tried all the hot, most coveted internships but was denied again and again. I kept shooting, with limited financial resources, in an attempt to pad my portfolio. Finally, after more than a year I was able to secure a three month, paid internship at a major US daily. I was still only semi-prepared for what awaited me.

If student journalism was sink or swim, the major newspaper world was a full on trial by fire. Less than a week after landing at the paper I was sent on a domestic assignment that required me to fly to another city, rent a car and cover a very high profile story. I wasn’t old enough to rent a car, so the paper had to make special arrangements. I was nervous as Hell. The photo-editor looked at me and said “Can you handle this?” I said “Ahhhhh.” He said, “Go home, have a beer and sack up.” I knew if I blew this I was most likely not going to get another assignment like this. Later that day, another photographer who may or may not have been unhappy about me getting this choice assignment, threw a bag of equipment at my head. The bag of equipment that barely missed my head turned out to be a bag of broken equipment, something I didn’t know until I landed and began trying to use the kit. (This left with me one with only one working strobe.)

The paper issued me a pager and a mobile phone, but the phone was faulty and rarely worked. Several times a week I would get a “911” page meaning stop what I was doing and give one hundred percent time and attention to the incoming request/demand/message. I would receive the page, most often an insane request requiring skill, luck, act of God, etc. and then I would receive a second page sayin “If you don’t fulfill this request don’t bother coming back to the paper, your internship is over.” I can remember driving down the road screaming and punching the roof of my truck out of utter rage and frustration.

Consequently, with this pressure and attention going on in the background, when it came time to work a scene, I worked the f&^%ing scene.

I remember doing a story on Christmas in rural Arizona where I ended up driving around the border region with a reporter who specialized in stories pertaining to the border and the rest of Latin America. I had pneumonia and was freezing cold but pouring sweat, borderline delusional but I kept thinking “I don’t have it yet.” It wasn’t until I got into a stranger’s house and made a serious of portraits and environmental images of their Christmas experience that I felt like I could try to make the drive home. I went straight to the emergency room at the county hospital because I knew they had to take anyone that walked in the door. I didn’t have health insurance. When I made it to the ER I recognized the doctor on duty because I had already done a story on her. She gave me a chest Xray and said “You are lucky you didn’t die.” “If you don’t take ten days and do nothing, this could kill you.” When the images ran in the paper I just kept thinking “This should have been better.”

I got a freelance magazine assignment to photograph Randy Johnson, the pitcher for the Mariners who was in town for spring training. I was warned how surly he could be, and sure enough after waiting for hours for him to appear, he took one look at my setup and said “I’m not doing that.” He then opened a side door and fled into the parking lot. “F^%$ this,” I said to myself grabbing my F4, strobe and 24mm. I chased him into the parking lot thinking “No way you are gonna me chewed out.” He was NOT happy with me as he zigzagged between cars trying to get away. Each of his turns punctuated by my strobe. I nailed it. The pictures were total s^%$ but the magazine editor said “Jesus man, way to not give up.” (The odd part of this story is that Randy Johnson is a huge fan of photography and is a dedicated snapper.)

In 1992 I began covering political conventions here in the United States. I covered both Democrat and Republican. I wasn’t there for politics. I was there for pictures, and these babies were a goldmine if you could endure and not get arrested. The police, especially in places like Houston and Los Angeles, were ultra-violent and used the event to test out new tactics and new crowd control measures. They also pushed legal boundaries by arresting anyone they didn’t like then holding them under a vague “terrorism” charge that allowed them to keep someone in jail for three days without charging them with any offense.

Between 1992 and 2000, I was kicked, punched, clubbed, gassed, and detained by law enforcement. I was also verbally assaulted at a world class level which didn’t bother me at all most likely because I had already endured so many nasty critiques. These conventions were the ultimate “work the scene” events because you knew the closer you got the more you were gonna get stung. The police would bait you into getting close then surround you with clubs, fists and feet. They would say things like “You can’t walk on the street, you have to be on the sidewalk.” And then as soon as you jumped to the sidewalk they would come in swinging their clubs, punching and slamming you with their riot shields while screaming “Get off the sidewalk.” Yes, incredibly juvenile but I’m sure it helped with things like boredom.

Between the moments of pain there were amazing images to be had, and the images were enough to continue to wade in. I was possessed, as were many of the photographers around me. At one point, an elderly photographer behind me got shot in the head with rubber bullet. He dropped like a stone and years later won a case against the LAPD. That particular scene went from slow and quiet to high order violence in less than fifteen seconds. Think tear gas, riot police rushing a crowd of protesters who were trapped inside a “designated protest area,” and rubber bullets being shot at civilians walking to work. Women and kids had to take cover, business men with briefcases were being wailed on by circles of police. I tried to find a way out of the area and ended up NOT making anything great. Failure to work the scene. It still bothers me.

The point of this post is to say there is no other way. If your intention is to get good you must be merciless. You must be relentless. You can’t shoot and do social media. You can’t shoot and think about where you want to have lunch. You can’t do ANYTHING but focus on the job. The scene is everything. The good photographers work hard. The great photographers enter the room and they don’t leave until the lights are being flashed and the bouncers come to tell you the party is over. And they do it each and every time. No breaks, no excuses, no settling for content bullshit.

The sad truth is that the number of photographers roaming the world continues to grow, but the number of great photographers continues to dwindle. And plenty of folks who used to be great no longer are. They have fallen prey to the shoot and post mentality. Work a scene until you have just enough and then walk to the fringe to post to the ignorant masses so you can feel good about your dopamine self. The good news, there are some incredible photographers out there who are working scenes at a world-class level. I recently got a sneak peak at a book of war photography from the conflict in Ukraine, and the work inside that book, a book compiled from the images of numerous photojournalists, was simply incredible. The results of working the most dangerous of scenes until there is nothing left to compose.

There is nothing wrong with dabbling in photography. That’s what most of us do. But the odds of producing something great without going all in are slight. You could show the work to an audience that knows next to nothing, and that might be enough hollow praise to satisfy your needs. “Sick Capture!” But for those who know their history, and for those haunted by knowing where the bar is set, well, then you have a difficult decision to make. How bad do you want it and what are you willing to do to get it?