Today we begin a new series on the blog featuring selected articles from Shooting From The Heart: Photography That Makes A Difference, our highly regarded handbook for photographers developing documentary projects. Over time this series will include most of the articles from the handbook, but if you can’t wait for the full series to be published, feel free to download a free PDF version of Shooting From The Heart and have a copy to keep as your own!
Beginning The Process
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
You have an idea for a documentary project. You find yourself thinking about it all the time. It is a story that has to be told. One that no one is telling. One that you want to communicate through your photographs. You decide that you have to act on your convictions.
Now the hard work begins. Decisions have to be made: how best to photograph the story, who to talk with, where to go, when to go, how to fund it. You are overwhelmed.
I know the feeling. I’ve been there. In 1983 I had a burning desire to tell the stories of salmon and the cultures that depend on the salmon around the Pacific Rim. Sure, there were plenty of stories in the newspapers about salmon. But they were stories about one small aspect—such as the closure of sport fishing seasons for lack of fish. No one was looking at the story in its entirety.
For the next year I researched the story and requested all news-paper assignments relating to salmon. I knew this would be a good project for the Alicia Patterson Foundation. I had heard about this nonprofit when I first started in photography. Each year six to eight journalists, including photographers, are selected for these fellowships. In 1986 I received one. The grant allowed me to take 14 months off from my newspaper photography job to pursue the story. I was ecstatic. But I soon realized that, although most people make a plan and then look for money, I had the money and no plan.
The story was huge, and complicated by the fact that salmon return to the rivers of their births just once a year. How was I ever going to cover it all?
After a month of sleepless nights and anxious days, I realized that it just couldn’t be done. I had to find situations that would rep-resent different aspects of the story. I took a week to concentrate on writing the general theme of the project. Then I divided it into different categories, such as life cycle, logging impact on streams, gillnetting, and marine mammal interception. In those days before computers, I wrote everything I knew on index cards according to subject and organized the cards in piles on the floor of my bed-room-turned-office.
As the piles grew, the project seemed to divide itself into five main areas: the incredible life cycle of the salmon and the creatures that feed on the fish; commercial and sport fishing; Indian fishing and ceremonies; salmon farms and ranches; and habitat destruction. I examined each set of index cards to determine what situation would make the best photographs and when the best time to photograph was. I then made hard decisions about what not to photograph.
For example, I could have photographed Indians fishing anywhere in the Northwest, Canada, or Alaska. I decided that the dip-net fishery on the Klickitat River in Washington would exemplify not only the current dependence on salmon of the Yakama Indians, but also the traditional fishing that members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition wrote about in the early 1800s. As they did in the old days, the fishermen stood on platforms hung from the walls of the river’s canyon. Using nets on long poles, they caressed the bottom to find the hidey-holes where the salmon rested. Most important, the Yakama Indians had agreed to give me access, the spring chinook fishing was just beginning, and the Klickitat was only a five-hour drive from my Seattle home.
After I had decided what and where to photograph, I transferred each subject onto Post-it notes. I placed those on a 12-month calendar. I then had a visual outline that could be adjusted as my plans changed. (Today many software programs make this organizational task even simpler.)
As soon as I made these hard decisions, I felt a weight lift from my chest. Although I did not have every single decision, trip, or con-tact finalized, I did have enough to begin doing what I love: photographing real people living their lives.
I had discovered that by dividing the overall story into smaller stories I could get my arms around it. Instead of planning my whole year, I took one month at a time. My 10-year project began with a theme, piles of index cards, a calendar, and one small step.
Natalie Fobes
