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It’s been a week or two since I posted anything at all, let alone any original work, but I’ve been working hard on my final project for this class. It took me a long time to find a topic for our final multimedia project that really interested me and motivated me, but once I did, it really turned the whole project around. I am incorporating audio, video, and photos of a local coffee shop that opened a few months ago here in Columbia into my story. I still need to visit Drip Coffee one more time to fulfill the project requirements, but I already feel like I have too much material for my 2 min. story. I guess there are worse problems to have. My goal is to have it all done and turned in by Tuesday, so keep checking back for updates!
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High ResolutionDays With My Father by Phillip Toledano
This photo essay was one of the first things I found upon making my personal tumblr account two years ago yesterday actually. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and can conveniently be purchased on Amazon for fans in need of a physical copy.
Kelly mentioned it in class recently in reference to the subject of photographing family members and also wound up posting about it on her blog. In her post she wrote:
“ I feel like when a photograph can extract any sort of strong emotion from a viewer, then the photographer has succeeded in taking a great picture.“
I have to agree with her, that while it is often frowned upon to rely on family as subjects, when it is done successfully it produces incredibly raw, emotional photographs. The proximity either has a way of clouding our creativity or grants us, as photographers, the ability to show a side few others would ever get access to. I have always appreciated the way Toledano captured the story of his aging father.
For some strange reason when I stumbled upon Timothy Archibald’s photo series “Echolilia,” “Days with my Father” came to mind. It may have had something to do with our recent class discussion of family as photo subjects, but I think it had more to do with the way in which the family members were portrayed.
The ultimate goal of photography, and photojournalism more specifically, is often referred to as the gift of uncommon vision. Both of the photo essays I have posted tonight definitely accomplish this goal. By photographing family members, Toledano and Archibald captured an unquestionably raw and beautiful view of both the young and the old grappling to cope in a world that leaves them feeling lost. As much as I love both of these stories and appreciate the way they are illustrated, I can’t help feeling a little uneasy.
Photojournalism often crosses a very thin and blurry line between illustrating a topic well enough to place any viewer in the moment and verging on exploiting a subject and their situation for the sake of the story. It is a line that is hard to define and something that both of these stories made me think about. Yes, the way the story told is gripping. Still I can’t help questioning if in photographing subjects so close to them, the photographers unintentionally crossed this line. Maybe the subjects of the photographs themselves weren’t exploited, but was their relationship to the photographer?
Just something to think about over the next week.
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Echolilia
All parents love their children. But what do you do when you can’t connect with them? In my case, I started making photographs of, and with, my son Elijah, who has autism spectrum disorder. This series—the title is from “echolalia,” a clinical term for the mimicking aspect of his condition—shows the bridges we’ve built on our shared journey of wonder, discovery, and understanding.
We began this project when Eli was five. He was doing well at school but fixating on odd things, lashing out, speaking repetitively. My wife and I couldn’t figure him out. Then I started taking pictures of him around the house. It was an instinctive act for a photographer: Point your camera at something in order to make sense of it. But a curious thing happened. As I documented what Eli was doing and creating, he became interested in the images I was making. I was learning how he thinks; he was learning what I like and value.
We soon had a system. Eli would do something unusual, one of us would notice, and we’d make a photo of it together. The pictures we took over three years were more raw and feral than anything I’d done as an editorial or advertising photographer. And more personal. This is, after all, the story of a father and his son.
Timothy Archibald’s book, Echolilia: Sometimes I Wonder, was published last year by Echo Press. See more of his work at timothyarchibald.com.
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High ResolutionAdventures in Pinhole Photography pt. 1-4
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High ResolutionAdventures in Pinhole Photography pt. 1-4
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High ResolutionAdventures in Pinhole Photography pt. 1-4
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High ResolutionAdventures in Pinhole Photography pt. 1-4
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High ResolutionCoffee shop mornings at Drip in Five Points.
A Visual Diary
My name is Ashley McGarry. I'm a junior Visual Communications major, minoring in graphic design at the University of South Carolina. This blog serves as a visual diary for the Advanced Photo-visual Communications class I will be taking this semester as a way to catalog my inspiration and record my progress.
© Ashley McGarry
All images are my own work, unless otherwise stated.
