Below is the World Press Photo 2006 Photo of the Year, which has caused some controversy and raises interesting issues as to who is responsible for what, who makes captions, and how much you think you know about what is apparently reality.
Read NPR's blurb on the issue, but more interestingly, listen to the short interview with the photographer on that page (it's Javascripted, making it hard to link directly). I went through the trouble of linking to the story at Der Speigel, which has an English-language version of the story available. NPR – links, please!
It's one of those cautionary tales about how you represent what you see in captions and to the rest of the world that wasn't there. The funny thing is that there is quite a bit of just the kind of contrasts that were apparently captured in this picture. But, as Der Speigel story pointed out, these people weren't the people in question.
And this was a good reminder to photographers such as myself, who are informed outsiders bringing in pictures that require a good working knowledge of the culture and society in order to even photograph – if that were me in that neighborhood, knowing nothing about Lebanon nor its class politics, I might not have been found anything unusual about this shot.
The photographer, Spencer Platt, had obviously known about the contrast, which is what caused him to make the split-second decision to shoot the car he said he saw coming out of the corner of his eye. Knowledge of the tensions in society and having seen this kind of scene many times before probably made him do a mental touchdown dance and mouth the word "nice!"
I can relate. When I was sitting at a table in a cramped grilled pork restaurant in Mapo, both my tablemates and myself had been listening to the powerful voice and caught glimpses of the animated gesticulations of a man who seemed the archetypical "sajangnim" or older man who is president of his own small business or company, likes to give sage advice about all sorts of life's trials over soju and meat, and wears a suit to everywhere but the shower.
Yet, I don't know this guy, and can only venture a guess as to who he is. There's a young girl sitting next to him who doesn't seem like his relative and could perhaps be a junior member of his organization, younger men who seem to know the man well, and older ladies in the foreground who don't seem to indicate that this is a company meeting, nor anything that would include women in the 40's and 50's.
In fact, it would be impossible to tell what's going on here just by looking – but the curious mix of people tells me that it's probably not a company meeting, and they don't look like relatives who know each other well. In the end, I don't know for sure, but it struck me as unusual and interesting enough – made so by the dynamic speaker who commanded everyone's attention – to snap a picture.
But say this picture suddenly became important. Maybe it wins a prize for some reason I can't foresee. People would be surprised to know that I took the picture as I was standing up and was so close that I didn't look through the viewfinder, but just aimed and shot. All the information I just processed for you above wasn't clear in the split second I took to choose to take the shot and the 2 or 3 seconds I let the shutter run.
As in many shots, it was motivated by instinct, a feeling that "Hmm. Something's interesting here." So you press the shutter button and work it out later. And in the editing, you sometimes find new things that you either didn't notice before, or hadn't consciously thought about, but were obviously motivations in taking the shot.
When I edited this, I realized why the man at the next table had struck me, as the image in my mind of "storytelling" had been the chord struck in my head. When I went home and looked through my photo books, I couldn't place the name, but found it in a collection of Life Magazine pictures. I had thought that this was part of the "Family of Man" series, but I had been wrong.
It was Nat Farbman's picture "Bushmen Children." He had been one of the first photographers to document the life of the nomadic tribes in southern Africa (something I had to look up), but the picture had always stuck in my head. That's why photographers should always be buying photo books.
One could bring up questions about the "anthropological gaze" and whatnot in these pictures, and in the connections that I made in my head, but I felt the key concept was "storytelling" when I snapped the shot. It made me think of that scene in Return of the Jedi when C3PO was retelling the story of the (then) previous two movies to the Ewoks, albeit as a near-deity and robotronic sound effects.
Since visual artists and storytellers such as Lucas are people who are good at their jobs and do their homework, I wouldn't be surprised if that scene in a Star Wars picture had been motivated by Farbman's very real picture taken from the human condition.
Yes, all that stuff can be bound up in an instant for a photographer, since photographers work in and deal in images, instants, and instinct.
