I make videos, I take photos, I’m not a writer. But if my past has taught me anything, it’s that if you want to get better at something you have to do it. Again and again and again. I suppose that’s the short answer of why I started writing, but there is a longer answer as well…
I make videos and take photos for fun. I also make videos and take photos for work. This was something I had strived after for a number of years, and I love it. I love the fact that every day I get to do something that I truly enjoy. However, it comes with its downsides. For instance, when work becomes busy with video projects, I lose my motivation to make videos purely for my own enjoyment. I wouldn’t say that it kills my passion, but it definitely can lead to some level of burnout. So, I decided to exercise my brain in a different way.
I may be wrong on this - because I’m not a scientist - but it feels like writing exercises different things in my head than shooting and editing videos does. I spend so much time on creating visuals that I needed something to be able to retreat to when I am feeling tired, or unmotivated to create videos. Maybe writing will give me a breath of fresh air from constantly staring into a camera screen.
Going hand in hand with this, I’ve realized that I take photos mainly for the visual aspect of it. I take the photo that would get the most reaction on social media, even staging them at times to get the most out of the frame as possible. The problem I see here is that when I look at the photos I typically don’t see stories as much as I see, “Oh yeah, I moved my van there and made my friend sit in that spot because it was the most aesthetically pleasing.”
A few weeks ago I met a woman who has been a photographing different aspects of Albania for the better part of the last three decades, Jutta Benzenberg. During my conversation with her, and hearing her talk about the photos that she takes I realized that there are two main types of stories that a photo can tell. The first is obviously the story of what is actually happening in a photo, which is obviously important but it’s something that can typically be derived by just looking at the photo itself without any further explanation.
The second type of story that a photo can tell is the contextual story. By that I mean the story that you can’t understand unless you were in that very spot when the photo was taken. I was looking through one of Jutta’s photo books and came across a photo that I don’t think I would have even saved had it been on my camera. There was a man, squatting down on the front steps of a house, but half the frame was covered by the out of focus head of a horse that seemed to be passing through the frame. I pointed this particular photo out, and asked why she chose to not only keep it, but to have it printed in a book. She proceeded to tell me the contextual story around the photo, that they man was a school teacher in another village and had could no longer walk the distance, so he needed to use the horse to get to school every day. She highlighted that the head of the horse basically covered half of the man’s face which, to her, made it seem like the two are one. The man cannot have his fully functioning life without that horse. My appreciation grew for that particular photo, and now it sticks in my brain, which is a far different reaction than my first impression of “Meh.”
After hearing about the backstory, and further conversations with Jutta, I realized that very few of my photos had stories like this and the ones that did almost no one knew the story. So I’ve decided to write. I’ve decided to make an effort to take photos that may not be the best for Instagram, but the ones that have stories. And that is where the writing comes in; to tell those stories.
I make videos, I take photos, I’m not a writer. But I’m trying to be.
