Janet Worne - Thoughtful Photography

Happy Birthday Hilary

My baby girl is 26. Yikes!!!

Happy Birthday Tessa

My dog, Tessa, is 6 years old today. It's hard to believe.
She is still an amazing dog with a personality that won't quit. She was a search and rescue dog for 4 years. The very first mission I took her on was as a small puppy. It was a house fire and one person was missing inside. My older dog, Dakhota, found the body and afterward, when the firefighters were finishing up, I walked Tessa around the scene to get her used to uneven footing and all the smells.

Happy Birthday Heather

Well--almost. My oldest daughter turns 30 (yikes!) on April 25th but I will be out of town then so this birthday wish is a little early.

This was taken 27 years ago on a drive trip across the country. I told her to run up and down a hill, yelling at the top of her lungs, during a rest stop to let off steam. What a cutie!

Deeper Sense of Wonder

Remember when you first started out in photography? Maybe you’re there now. Everything is brand new. Exciting. You’re like a child seeing the world for the first time. And now, with a camera in your hand, you can capture that excitement in a way no one else can and hold it frozen forever in the magic of your photographs.

Fast-forward 27 years. You’ve been fortunate enough to have made your living out of that love of photography. It has been a wonderful, exciting time yet you realize that all those years of trying to please editors and molding your vision to someone else’s story has changed your perspective. Reading the Minor White quote in yesterday’s post you concede that maybe you’ve lost some of that youthful “innocence of eye”. Perhaps you dig through some of your work from your carefree early days. You see that you lacked the experience and skills you now possess but there is a playfulness and freshness that is currently missing from your work. What happened?

This is where I find myself now. As an adult, my viewpoint is not as fresh as that of a child because my eye is tainted by the lens of experience. I often wonder, can I recapture the magic and still retain what I have gained from experience and maturity? The real trick may be to let go of the voices in my head telling me to shoot what they (the editors) want and to rediscover what makes me happy. I think what most editors want is that freshness and sense of wonder anyway.

Perhaps now, with a renewed self-awareness about my work, I can come full circle and find within myself an even deeper sense of wonder.

Today I Have Hope

 
On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration I am thinking about race relations in our country and what this new president means to America.

I grew up in a small Quaker neighborhood in Delaware in the sixties that consisted of twelve houses.  Three families were African American. Two were Italian, one was Polish, one was German/Chinese and I believe the rest were Caucasian unless my memory is missing something. We were a tight-knit group and it was a wonderful atmosphere for a child to grow up in. When my parents bought the house, they were approached by the neighborhood association and told that if they were prejudiced in any way they were not welcome. This was during a time when most neighborhoods were doing the opposite.

Fast forward to the nineties in Lexington, Kentucky. I was covering race riots that resulted from when a white cop shot and killed a black kid. I inadvertently got caught in the middle of a crowd of angry protestors. I was alone in the projects. They surrounded me, taunted me, tried to steal my cameras, punched me in the head and tried to pull me to the ground. Somehow, I managed to keep my cool, get to my car and drive off, very badly frightened and bruised.

I ended up interviewed on national television and I think the interviewer was a little disappointed that I wasn’t angry and didn’t say anything more divisive. But I honestly believed that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could understand their frustration and anger. And there were many blacks there that day that did try to help me.

A year later I worked on a race relations project for the Herald-Leader (see my “Coming Together” post from June). The whole experience left me wondering if we had made any progress at all since Martin Luther King’s time. Of course we have, at least legally, but  on a more subtle, personal level---have we?

Today, I have hope. Today, as I see what very-soon-to-be-president Obama has done for our nation I am more proud of my country than I have ever been.

Today I feel like my country comes a little closer to matching that little neighborhood I grew up in.

History of Photography

Anyone who looks into their own family history can learn something about the history of photography. That was a subject I studied in college and genealogy is a topic I have obsessed over on my own in the past few years. Don't ask me why. There are many good books out there on the history of photography so I won't go into too much detail. Look it up yourself if you're interested. But many of you probably have old family albums lying around gathering dust and don't realize the wealth of information they contain, both about your family specifically, but also about the history of our country and the history of the medium. I wanted to show you a few examples here.

This is a tintype of my great, great grandfather that was mounted in a paper holder, dated as you can see, March 19, 1870. Tintypes were popular at that time. The stamp also mentions the Dorchester & Delaware RR. I did a little more digging and found that he did work for that railroad at that time.

This is known as a Cabinet Card, a photograph mounted on a heavy piece of cardboard. This man was also a great, great grandfather who fought in the civil war in the Battle of Sailor’s Creek and lost an arm. This photo was taken somewhere around 1870. He looks just like my grandfather and I even see a little of my brother in him.

I love this picture. My grandfather took this with a box camera. This was at a time when photography first became accessible to the average person. He probably set up the scene. I used this picture a few years ago for my Christmas cards. He was an avid amateur photographer and passed that love on to me. In fact, I think my first camera was an old one he used. My first enlarger was an old Leitz that belonged to my other grandfather. The only way to focus it was to loosen a screw and manually lift it up and down. Those were the days!

I think about those early photographers and the difficulties they faced in order to produce just one good photo. Even early in my career, when we went on the road for a basketball tournament, we had to set up a darkroom in the hotel and we were lucky to send a couple pictures back by leafax machine in time for deadline. Now, we can sit on the floor and send numerous pictures during a timeout. Imagine being a photographer during the Civil War!

Here are a few more....

What gems do you have hidden away?

Inspirational Story

Who among us does not enjoy an "if they can do I can do it" story? Well I have one of those in my family. My mother was an archaeological photographer for the State of New Mexico Archaeology Lab and a documentary photographer for many years before she went blind about 7 or 8 years ago. Ouch. A photographer's worst nightmare. As far as she was concerned her life was over. She sold her cameras and darkroom equipment and settled down to a life of books on tape.

 But then a photographer friend of hers, Lucien Niemeyer, insisted otherwise. He looked through her stockpile of images from nearly twenty years of shooting and saw the potential of several books lying in wait. The first was published over a year ago: The Jicarilla Apache: A Portrait, by Nancy Hunter Warren.

This was a huge boost to her self-esteem. The book did well. People liked it and she was asked to speak at Sam Abell's book publishing class at the Santa Fe Workshops. This gave her the nudge she needed. What else could she accomplish? She found another collection of photographs hiding in her archives that were worthy of a book. She now has a writer/anthropologist and a publisher working with her on this. I can't talk about the topic yet but it may be published next spring.

So now when I indulge in that soggy low area called "feeling sorry for myself" and feel like I can't do something or I'm not "good enough", I only need to think about my blind photographer mother who published a photo book and has another on the way.

If she can do it I can do it.

That's Sam Abell on the left.

This is one of her pictures from the book.

Working Mom

As a mentor, I get asked about juggling the demands of being a widow with a family and the difficult job of a photojournalist. I think about that when I see Sarah Palin on the campaign trail with a special needs baby in tow. Of course it helps to have the money and support she has to make it work. Every mother must ask herself those difficult questions and find the answers that make sense for her situation. Only she knows what is right for her own life. And then she must live with the results of her choices. This goes for men as well.

When my girls were young they sometimes whined when it was time for me to leave for work. This led to the same old argument:
“Mommy, I don’t want you to go to work.”
“I have to.”
“Who says?”
“My boss.”
“Then you have a mean boss if he makes you go to work when your little girl needs you!” Then came the tears.

I finally realized that I wasn’t being totally honest with them. I wanted to work. I loved my job. When I’m happy, my relationship with them is smoother. They are proud of what I do. And with that kind of role model maybe they won’t suffer the dreaded mother-guilt thing when they have children of their own.

So I explained that to them and they understood. After that, when they asked why I had to go to work, I told them because it made me happy.

I feel good about the way my children turned out. They are happy, motivated, and considerate adults who are both in graduate school pursuing challenging careers. They grew up knowing that women can be passionate about their jobs and be good mothers too.

Over the years they have talked fondly about the aroma of fixer, or “Mommy’s perfume”, as they called it, and how the smell of it meant that “Mommy’s home”. My self-generated stories were mostly local and sometimes topics that interested my kids as well. I visited their classrooms to give presentations on photojournalism. I never missed a parent-teacher night, school play or concert.

As a widow, my greatest fear in life was leaving my kids orphaned. I had a talk with them shortly after their father died and told them, “I can’t promise you that I will never die, but I can promise that I will be careful because I know that you need me.” I have kept that promise over the years. I think about it when I’m rushing to a news event or covering riots. I have gotten my share of beatings, sideline tackles and balls to the head but I’m probably more cautious than many of my male co-workers. I have passed up opportunities to cover war situations. I know that this means I don’t produce the kind of sensational photos that always win contests but I think I bring extra sensitivity and humanity to my work.

Right before he died, my husband, Kenn, made me promise that I wouldn’t give up on my career. He said I was good at it and loved it too much.

I kept at it for 26 years and I’m glad I kept my promises.

Happy Birthday Hilary

25 years ago today, my youngest daughter, Hilary, was born. Both my girls were delivered naturally with the help of a midwife. Drug free was the best way to experience the scary, messy, miracle of birth. If I could only be remembered for one accomplishment in my entire life, it would be this. Having and raising two wonderful girls.

The Darkest Hour - Part 2

(If you haven't read part 1- see the previous post)

I didn’t set out to do a story in the way I might for the newspaper. It happened gradually. For a long time we never dreamed that Kenn would die or at least we didn’t admit it. So I didn’t feel a need to take pictures of everything. I photographed a few things much in the same way I always did. They were just family pictures. I took pictures when he started losing his hair. We thought it was kind of funny. It was a temporary problem. Then as the situation intensified I needed the creative release more than ever but I felt funny about doing it. It seemed cruel to Kenn.

One particularly bad day, when we were in the hospital for a chemotherapy treatment, the walls closed in on me. I teetered on the edge of panic. I couldn’t breath or speak. Kenn sensed it and suggested that I take some pictures. So I took a few photos of him in his hospital bed with his balding head and tubes protruding from his body. They weren’t very good but somehow the act of shooting snapped me out of the panic. I think even he felt better because he clowned around a bit for the camera.
 
After that I started taking more pictures. I was hesitant to do it around the hospital staff and most of the time Kenn needed me to hold his hand and just be there. But I kept my camera within reach and used it periodically. Considering the amount of time the illness dragged on, I shot very little film. But each frame was important.

At first I didn’t print anything. I just developed the film and filed it. I couldn’t bear to look at it. And I certainly wasn’t going to show it to anyone. I was sure they would think I was crazy. Insensitive.

After awhile I printed a few of the photos. I found to my surprise that they were good and it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would to look at them. I printed more and soon documenting our lives became an obsession. I wanted to show relationships within our family. As I worked on this it became apparent that something was missing. Me.
 
So I started using the timer on my camera to take pictures of me with Kenn and the kids. This felt weird. I’m sure many people wonder how I could do such a thing. It seemed artificial even to me. Was I entering the realm of setting up shots? I worried about this and finally decided that it was a reasonable thing to do as long as I was truthful. I never stopped to comb my hair or arrange props.

It seemed as if the camera worked independently of me. When I found myself involved in something that I thought would make a good picture I would simply set the camera next to me on the bed or a table, guess on the focus and hit the timer. Then I would go back to what I was doing. The camera did the rest. Usually I did that during the long, boring stretches in the hospital when Kenn was asleep and it didn’t interfere with doing whatever he needed me for.

My documentation eventually reached a point where I spread the pictures out in front of me to assess what I had done. I stayed up late that night alone in my room staring at the images for two hours or more. In a flash of insight, I realized that those pictures were good. What I saw before me wasn’t all pain and sadness. They were laced with love and hope. It dawned on me that they were trying to tell me what Kenn’s doctor had been saying all along. It was okay to accept his impending death and be optimistic at the same time. If I denied it and fought it, then I would miss out on the living we could experience in the present while we still had each other. There can be a lot of happiness in between the tears.

After that night, I began to show the photos to other people. Kenn said he didn’t mind and he thought that they were good but he never asked to see them again. His doctor agreed with my insight. Kenn’s family cried. They thought the pictures were wonderful and wanted some copies. The kids were outwardly indifferent and said they didn’t mind. But those images became extremely important to me. Soon it would be all I had left of Kenn.

My husband died in October 1987. I picked up the pieces of my life and trudged on. The negatives and photographs went in a drawer to collect dust. I was emotionally drained and couldn’t bring myself to do anything with them or even think about them for a while. When I finally looked at them again I was shocked to see what my family and I endured.

I know the experience will always be with me and if I have learned anything at all that I can carry to my next assignment and perhaps share with other photographers it’s this: Don’t let your own fears distance you from your subject. If a photographer backs off during an emotional moment, he or she may really be protecting his or her own feelings. Death is a terrifying specter to look squarely in the eye, but if a photographer can at least come close then maybe that bit of understanding will help produce pictures that really say something.

I’m not advocating the obnoxious approach and there will be many who won’t want to be photographed at all. We must respect that. But when a subject agrees then maybe they felt the same needs that I experienced and I know that they will appreciate a photographer who takes the time to try and understand what they are going through. Really talk to them. A person in that situation needs more communication not more walls.