David Paul Carr

This picture was made for a commissioned story about a militant group of electrical technicians who reconnect people they consider to be suffering unreasonable hardship after having had their power supply unfairly cut off.

All the elements are here: the lady, her baby, the empty hearth, the heater that’s not working.  On a job like this I have a pretty clear idea what I need in my picture. In this case I had to evoke the consequences of having no electricity or gas – being unable to heat or cook or wash with warm water – and  show that real people were involved. From my briefing, I knew that only one picture would be used and that it would be a horizontal.

Whenever I can (which is surprisingly often) I explain to the people I’m photographing exactly what I’m hoping to achieve and why. I also ask if they are happy with what I propose doing and if they have any suggestions as to how it might be done better.  It took me a long time to learn that I do not have a monopoly on good ideas…

Apart from the fact that this method seems to be the most courteous and effective way of working, it also comes from the realization that I can never really know that much about my subjects.

Normally, I am just passing through, given the task of producing a graphic object – a photograph – of a situation that is intended as a vehicle for certain ideas. What these ideas might be depends partly on me but largely on the person that is commissioning the work.  First and foremost a photograph (or any other creation) tells the story of its own origins. I may be given a greater or lesser degree of creative freedom but, in the end, the client always has an intention for the work I produce.

Now, all that may seem obvious or of little consequence, so why mention it here?

Because when that idea is fully integrated into the way I interact with the people I’m photographing, we can actually begin to work together. I remain an outsider but at least this is acknowledged by both parties. I have little control over how an  image I produce will be used or what the journalist I’m working with will write.  Neither can I guarantee that the image published will bring any tangible benefit to the people portrayed. What I can hope for  is that they will feel that it is an honest representation arrived at through a collaborative process.

That, of course, is when things go well…

This was originally intended to be a technical post. Another one about using small cameras. Better get back on topic…

I went (to the other end of France for this photograph) fully equipped: two DSLRs, some lenses, a handful of flashes and a Ricoh GRD2 compact camera.

I always have a mental list of things I want to try out on jobs. Testing stuff at home just isn”t the same and often brings me to  the wrong conclusions. It’s only when you try things out in real working situations that you can draw any conclusions applicable to… real working situations. Here I was curious to see whether I could get a publishable picture with the Ricoh. I knew that the file size and quality would be perfectly acceptable. That’s no longer an issue. What I didn’t know was whether I would be able to work fast enough or whether the 28mm (equivalent) fixed focal length lens would be a problem. I was also interested to see how my subject would react to such an “amateur” looking piece of equipment. Sometimes the choice of camera is determined by how people react to it, rather than reasons of image quality.

(Side note: I regularly wonder whether I could do a whole reportage job with just a small bag full of compacts).

So I did a first series of pictures with a DSLR, trying to get something spontaneous but nothing really worked. There was no spontaneity because (see above) I was just a stranger passing through. There’s little worse than fake intimacy.

A different approach then: explain exactly what I wanted, why we should try to organize the picture together, with the common goal of getting an effective illustration.

It worked. Although I showed the (happy) client the DSLR photographs it was obvious beyond any doubt that this was the one we should use.

One key to getting good images from compact cameras is not to associate their small size with speed of use. A deliberate approach, using the LCD as if it were the ground-glass screen of a view camera , gives me better results. Instead of finding yourself with a slow compact you suddenly have a very fast view-camera. It’s a question of attitude.

The final photograph was lit with off-camera bounce flash, triggered from the Ricoh with a PocketWizards.