A Visual Diary

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.