Janet Worne - Thoughtful Photography

Margaret Bourke-White

“Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open, and I wanted to be first.”
                    ---Margaret Bourke-White


One of my early female influences was Margaret Bourke-White. Not only did she have characteristics that I wanted to emulate as a photographer, but she also had a few qualities that I most certainly did not want. I learned from both.

I read two books about her life and both were great. One was her autobiography, “Portrait of Myself” and the other was “Margaret Bourke-White, A Biography” by Vicki Goldberg. It was particularly revealing to read both and to see the differences in how events were portrayed. That Margaret glossed over a few things and remembered her treatment of people a little more charitably in her autobiography gives you a clue as to what I was talking about above.

She was courageous, talented, determined, sexy, groundbreaking, and never took no for an answer. She was also single-minded, sometimes selfish, conceited, known to use her sex and tears to get what she wanted and was often rude and difficult to work with.

She was a woman—and a photographer—of firsts. She had the first cover photo of Life Magazine. She was the first female war correspondent (World War II) and among the first to photograph the newly liberated inmates at Buchenwald concentration camp. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. She photographed Stalin, Patton, Gandhi, and many other limited-access subjects.

I loved her sense of composition in her early industrial photos, her streak of humanity in her depression series and her grasp of history in her war coverage. It was reading about her life that first brought home to me the difficulties that faced women trying to live the life of a photojournalist. Her solution was to work harder than most of her male colleagues and she never hesitated to use her femininity when she thought it would help her get what she wanted. But she never found a way to have her career and a family life at the same time. She had two brief marriages and no children. She knew herself well enough to choose career over family and never regretted it.

“…I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance. This was something I could not have if I was torn apart for fear of hurting someone every time an assignment of this kind came up…Dashing off at a moment’s notice around the globe is wonderful if you are doing the dashing yourself. But if you are the one who stays behind, it must be hard to bear.”

Perhaps there would be fewer failed marriages if more people were insightful enough to make this kind of choice. My choice was similar but from an opposing camp. I chose family. That was my highest priority. So instead of covering wars, famine and exotic places, I covered hometown news, college sports, homeless, local politics and once in awhile I got sent to cover a hurricane or some national story in DC. I really can’t complain because there is just as much beauty, drama, emotion and history in local events as there is in international events. It’s just on a smaller scale and the people don’t dress differently and at the end of the day (or couple of days if it’s a big story) I got to go home to my family.

Georgia O'Keefe--True to Herself

My first look at a female artist is Georgia O’Keefe. I have included her even though she was a painter and not a photographer, because she has always been a tremendous influence in my work.

Her wonderful sense of composition was clean and elegant. Her use of color was almost musical. I can only say that when I look at certain of her pieces my heart sings. I also feel an affinity for her way of framing a scene. In fact, while reading her bio on the website of the New Mexico Office of the State Historian, I came across this: “Her paintings often used the framing and foreshortening that the photographer employed with the lens, and in the dark room. Her paintings, of huge flowers or bleached bones, cropped in unusual ways, mirrored the photographer’s gaze.”

    I saw an exhibit last year at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called “Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities”. It was fascinating to see the similarities between her work and Ansel Adams photographs. I found a video on YouTube about this exhibit that is worth watching.

Not only was she good friends with Ansel Adams, but she was married to Alfred Stieglitz, a pioneer in American modernist photography. There are many good biographies out there about her life so I won’t go into those details here, but my take away from her story is admiration for her wisdom and knowledge of her own needs. She was able to hear the voices inside herself and stay true to her art. She was determined to create good work and have it be judged by it’s own merits and not on the basis of her gender. She had the courage to take risks and do what she needed to do.

"To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage."                 ---Georgia O'Keefe

   

Happy Mother's Day

As we made our way through Italy we always felt safe and nurtured. For at nearly every turn there was the Mother Mary watching over us. In this country, the image of Madonna is everywhere. Many of the icons are old and yet have been honored with fresh flowers. These are not relics from previous generations to be passed by in modern life and ignored. They are still very much a part of their world today.

Mothers will always be an important part of any society.

I found her image on a wall along a mountain path in Vernazza:

...in a painting flanked by some scary looking light fixtures in Siena:

...watching over a Siena souvenir shop:

...guarding the gates of a castello in Chianti:

...and in a sun-dappled Florence alley:

People Watching in Italy

I am a Watcher by nature as I've admitted before and Italy is a great place for people watching. Since I was a tourist, many of my destinations were populated mostly with other tourists but I did have the opportunity to observe the natives as well. I found them to be friendly and not particularly camera-shy.

Why the fascination with other people? For me, it's not the differences I look for but rather, the things we have in common. The little things I can relate to in another human being. On the surface we may not be able to speak the same language, we may have different skin color, we may not dress the same, our food preferences may be polar-opposite, but there is always some fundamental human emotion or condition to which I can relate. I may only connect with the person from afar by watching and responding internally to their body language or we may bond with a smile and a wave.

These restaurant workers in Florence rewarded me with a smile and "Buon Giorno!" while taking a break from their job:

The body language of two young lovers who came out to the Ponte Vecchio in Florence for some evening entertainment is universal and easily understood:

Two young girls sat in front of a butcher shop in Siena to rest and play with their cameras:

Sometimes I cannot help but to connect a person in an abstract way to their surroundings as well as sympathize with the body language--like this woman's obvious back pain as she leans on her cane in Montorosso al Mare:

Meanwhile, at the beach in Montorosso al Mare, a tourist soaked in the sun:

...while two others danced in the surf:

Palm Sunday Lesson

Sometimes you have every detail planned in advance. The altar boys are suitably dressed. They have been coached on how to ride a donkey. The animal’s feet have been taped so as not to mar the church floor. The boughs of palm have been passed out to the crowd. The only thing not counted on was the one aspect of a donkey’s personality that it is most known for—it’s stubbornness.

This was one of those times that I watched an event unfolding through my viewfinder, desperately suppressing a laugh. The boys tried everything to get the animal into the church but nothing worked. It reminded me of attempting to get my toddler daughter to eat when she had made up her mind not to. I learned that sometimes you just have to "go with the flow" or "let go and let God" (since we're in church mode here).

The donkey was unyielding. They finally did give up and the Palm Sunday service was held without the animal.

Homeless and Mentally Ill, Part 3

I've been working on a new website--a long and tedious process--and I've been digging through more of my older photos, including my series on the homeless mentally ill. You can see my earlier examples in April 2008 (You can click on the dates at right).

For a year I followed up on police calls whenever I could...

The mentally ill often self-medicated with alcohol...

I visited jails...

And I spent time in soup kitchens and shelters...

I was always very careful not to upset anyone. If someone was adamant about not wanting to be photographed, I tried to respect that. Overall, the police were very helpful because they saw serious problems with existing laws and wanted them changed.

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.

Off The Beaten Track

 
One thing I always loved about working as a photojournalist is that my job took me off on the side roads and into the small towns of rural America. It was there that I was able to meet some of the most interesting people of my career, including this man who was taking a break from his job at a service station in Maryland.