Something I have struggled with as a photographer before facilitating photography classes at the Genesee Center for the Arts and Education is photographing the same thing as everyone else. Be it a social event, festival, protest, etc., if there were others with a camera capturing images, I didn’t want to be one of them. Then I found myself instructing small groups of people in photo field trips, street photography and social reportage classes. Through this I learned to let go and jumped in, realizing each person sees the world through their own unique lens and though sometimes photos of the same subject by multiple photographers may look alike, they are very different.
An example can be seen on Canon’s The Lab: Decoy. Canon Australia devised The Lab, a series of experiments that are designed to take you out of your comfort zone, and get you thinking and shooting in a different way. Their first experiment involves having six photographers shoot the same man, but they are each told a different story about the actor’s background.
Each photographer having a different background history of the subject, who is an actor, may have helped the images to be different…more so than if each participant had met the subject and told nothing.
The Photo Field Trips are much the same way, we happen upon strangers around each corner, students engage while the story unfolds, each capturing different views of the same subject. Getting to know the person or persons you are photographing and listening to leaves very little room for judgement. Images become a part of the story, a gift to the socially engaged photographer, their subject and the viewer.