I am a travel photographer and I spend a good part of my time photographing rather different places around the world, and their inhabitants. One of the biggest problems that I encounter is deciding what is important, what is going to be the central pin in the story that I want to tell. In portrait work this problem doesn’t exist – The central idea is the person whose portrait is being taken, of course. But often we see photographs in which we don’t know what is really of interest to the photographer, or what it is that they want to show us.
Photographs, before all else, are a choice and a decision to personally interpret what we are seeing, filtered of course by our culture, personal experiences, and our emotions.
And in order to be able to guide the gaze of an onlooker, before all else, we have to learn how to see. Our brains require a certain order and the photographic gaze needs a particular, special order.
When someone looks at a photograph, we look for something to fix their interest on. If they are confronted with a landscape, with characters, they use patterns which are both consciously and unconsciously filtered by their emotions. As we understand and control these emotions, the photographic result will be something more controlled and we can effectively guide the eye of the audience.
A good photographer understand intuitively before taking the photograph how it will be ‘read’ so to speak by the audience, and decides how to tackle the posing of the main character, the geometric lines, the light, and the point of view. All of this comes together to make a unique image.
If you don’t know what interests you, it is difficult to call someone else’s attention to your photo. For this reason it is important to decide what is the central element or the ‘anchor’ of your story, and establish a ‘central knot’.
The ‘anchor’ is the point in the image where the audience is going to center their gaze, from where the whole story is going to take off from. Also, sometimes it’s the place where the audience’s eye will return to after ‘reading’ the photograph.
This ‘anchor’ does not have to be a person; it can be an element of the landscape: the steppes of Mongolia, the Ganges in Varanasi, the Eiffel Tower. And why not a monk in Myanmar, a hairdresser in Delhi, or a boy playing in a park? It can be anything.
The space which a person occupies within a photograph and their attitude and expression is essential. I am not only talking about physical space, but what they are doing, what is going on around them. Everything else is secondary.
As I am a travel photographer I do not habitually do photography in a studio. The people that I photograph are very rarely posed and it is a complicated process to move them without the magic of the moment disappearing. Poses should be used with great caution in order not to end up with absurd, unnatural looking positions and expressions. What is certain is that in my travels never do I find anything where it is supposed to be. Not the light, nor the people, or the scene. Everything has the strange ability to tend towards chaos. So it is my mission as a photographer to bring order to the chaos.
This makes you work with the light that exists and a few aspects (those that happen to be there in any given moment) that can, difficultly enough, move if they feel like it. This is why it is so important to understand what the position of the central figure, or the ‘hero’ of the image (or heroes if the photo hosts a whole chorus), really is.
The way in which the characters relate to each other is one of the most fundamental things. In situations which are basically uncontrollable your best allies are patience, calm, and time. You need to understand what is happening in front of you, and to do this you must invest time observing a scene and the movement of the people in it.
After some meditation on the way in which I take photographs, I have come up with six phases for my process:
1. The call of curiosity: Excepting times where I am looking for something special or a specific place, often it’s my own curiosity that is what drives me or makes me take interest in a character or situation that I end up photographing. Then in a few moments I decide I am going to invest my time in a fixed place and start looking for my photograph.