Don't know if I just spend too much time in the photography related parts of hive or what but process posts seem to be something of a fad as of late.
Not that I think that's a bad thing but it got me to thinking about my personal process, or lack thereof. I mostly just get myself into location/situations and just go with the flow. Pretty helpful, right? While I don't have a better explanation of how that works I thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the things that have shaped how I work.
One major influence and source of inspiration for me is Cheryl Dunn's documentary Everybody Street. It's about photographers who have made the streets of New York City a major subject of theirs. I saw it for the first time shortly after I got my first DSLR it had a major impact on me, I try to watch it periodically as something of a refresher. It was my first real exposure to street photography and seeing all the different photographers and hearing them talk about their approaches to photography made me want to go out and experiment for myself.
It's only an hour and a half long and available in its entirety for free on youtube (you can follow the link above, I'll also include the video at the end of this post) so give it a glance if you get a chance.
The other two influences that I'm going to mention are both books that I read long before I really got into photography. My background is in history, both books are by correspondents that covered the Vietnam War that I read in the context of studying that war.
John Laurence did three stints in Vietnam as a correspondent and his book about those experiences, The Cat From Hue, is a hell of a read. His experiences and his wrestling with how to cover the conflict resonated particularly strongly last year during the protests here. A good bit of the book talks about friends of Laurence who were some of the noted photographers of that war. Tim Page, Dana Stone, Sean Flynn were some of the main ones and also served as something of photography role models for me.
Michael Herr's Dispatches is the second book that has heavily influenced me. The book is probably the closest thing to a Hunter S Thompson dispatch from Vietnam we'll ever see, albeit with slightly less drug use. Herr was part of the same small circle of photographers and correspondents that Laurence kept company with and features many of the same people. Unlike Laurence's book, this one is somewhat fictional (some characters are inventions/composites) but that does little to change the book's impact.
For anybody who has seen the movies Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now parts of the book will seem familiar. Herr co-wrote the screenplay for the first and worked on the narration for the second and elements of the book were used in both movies.
When I'm out shooting and particularly with the recent protests, these three heavily influenced the how's and why's of what I shot. Not in the sense of 'What would Jack Laurence do?' so much as how thought about what I shot and what message I was trying to send or what emotion I sought to capture.
Enough about what has influenced me, what has influenced your photography?
