Where I worked (Sarasota, FL) photographers didn’t have beats, you shot everything the editors sent you after and what you found along the way…often the best stuff, but hardest for the editors to find captions for…

I worked as a reporter too, police, city, county beats. Very much defined by the offices you reportted from. More interesting after I became an editor, because they sent me out as a reporter when something unexpected happened. That’s always hte best experience, go somewhere and find out what’s going on, on the fly, as it happens.

I was being a bit harsh on the Mirror Project game, which really has nothing to do with the complaint I was making here (unless you count it as further upfront evidence of self-absorption—and surely no one would accuse bloggers of being self-absorbed.)

;-)

In fact, Tim has a good mirror project picture in there somewhere, back around 1999.

I think I’m a bit over-sensitive on the photography-as-power issue after a year watching tourists photograph people like livestock in places like Laos and Bolivia. It’s hard. Photos from that trip are much more evocative than any words I ever wrote—but they affect imbalanced relationships much more than notebooks.

-D.

It’s not about photography versus words; I love good photography. It’s about respecting people’s dignity. It happens that photography by its nature is more intrusive and makes it easier to dehumanize. But like any art, it can only bring out asshole tendencies that are already there—it doesn’t create them.

It’s not sucking on our own feelings but tasting other peoples that tells us how to make a better humanity. Word and pictures are just different coloured straws.

On the other hand, the big camera is a mediating device. It says “Get ready to have yer pitcher took.” As for the mirror project, it was there I found an image of Jonathon when I didn’t know where else to look. Good image – emotional vampires – and I’m glad I didn’t play the mirror project game or there’d be one more sliver of insecurity adding to the karmic burden I feel for not yet bringing my Dervala project to a successful conclusion.

THE GREEN FIELDS OF FRANCE
Well how do you do, Private William McBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your grave side?
A rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone that you were only 19
when you joined the glorious fallen in 1916.
And I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, William McBride, was it slow and obscene?

CHORUS:
Did they beat the drum slowly?
did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing ‘The Last Post’ in chorus?
Did the pipes play ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined
And though you died back in 1916
To that faithful heart are you always 19.
Or are you just a stranger without even a name
Forever enclosed behind some glass-pane
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Well the sun it shines down on these green fields of France,
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance.
The trenches are vanished now under the plough
No gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it is still No Man’s Land
And the countless white crosses in mute witness stand.
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that was butchered and downed.

And I can’t help but wonder now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe them that this war would end war?
But the suffering, the sorrow, some the glory, the shame – The killing and dying – it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they beat the drum slowly?
did they sound the pipe lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing ‘The Last Post’ in chorus?
Did the pipes play ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’?

I think he was good at photography because he was unafraid to take pictures of strangers, and he took those pictures on an equal footing with his subjects. He saw beauty where other people didn’t. And he spent so much time just looking at the world—composing and discarding, with and without a lens. His gift was in all the pictures he didn’t take.

I love taking pictures, though I’m shyer about it, and I tend to think in words not images.

Maybe in bitching about callous photo bloggers I’m the equivalent of the print journalist who whines about amateur bloggers. I’m not sure I really said what I wanted to say in this piece. It just struck me as so weird that at this exhibition that was about reclaiming humanity from tragedy, cameras were giving them these weirdly depersonalized reactions.

What beat did you cover as a photographer?