Janet Worne - Thoughtful Photography

Finding Fred

I have just finished editing my second book and published it on Amazon Kindle. It's called Finding Fred and can be found here.

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.

Self-Promotion

Self-promotion is the most difficult part of being a freelance photographer for me and for many other freelance photographers I know. If you are not careful to guard against it, your work becomes a part of who you are, your essence--your soul, which in an artistic sense is not always a bad thing. But in the commercial world of freelance photography we all know how hard it is to lay that part of yourself open to the dreaded REJECTION. I'm still struggling with that issue.

In an earlier post I mentioned John Kaplan's book on portfolios; now here is a book I found helpful along the same vein called "Successful Self-Promotion for Photographers" by Elyse Weissberg. It deals with putting together a portfolio but is a little heavier on marketing. John's book touches on marketing but is much heavier on the portfolio side of it. The two books complement each other very well.

How To Put Together A Portfolio

This post is for all those young photographers out there who write to me for advice on putting together a portfolio. Come to think of it, photographers at any stage of their careers may have reason to put together a new portfolio, so this is for you too. A good friend of mine, John Kaplan, wrote this book packed with great suggestions. And John would know. He is a Pulitzer winning photographer and is now a professor at the University of Florida and all around great guy. I call him a good friend even though we touch base very infrequently. He's just one of those people I think fondly of. I met him when he worked at the now-defunct Pittsburgh Press. We had both interned at the Wilmington News-Journal, although not at the same time.

If you're looking for good advice on the subject, get this book, you can't go wrong with John Kaplan.

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.

Sam Abell on Signature Style

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Abell more than year ago. We have remained friends and I consider him a mentor. Here, in two parts, I will post a story I wrote for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

“The world was divided by an ever-present level line that splits the world equally—above and below, near and far, known and unknown.”

National Geographic photographer, Sam Abell, wrote that in his book, “Sam Abell: The Photographic Life”. He was referring to the topography in Ohio where he grew up but also about his signature, a particular style of seeing or giving structure to the world. This signature—the horizon line—grew organically out of that childhood landscape. He wrote that this level line “is at the center of my seeing and gives to deeply different places a common ground.”

I had heard him describe this the first time I saw him speak at the University of Kentucky more than ten years ago and I felt an instant kinship. Here was a real thinker. A spiritual photographer. Someone who has difficulty separating his personal life from his work.

I have been accused of thinking too much. And it’s true, I do. It drives me crazy sometimes. But here was a photographer whose work I had long admired, with a thoughtful, analytical approach to photography and it showed in the depth of his work.

To a photographer who likes to think that a tree is not just a tree and a photograph is not just emulsion on paper, this was exciting stuff. It started me thinking about my own work. Did I have a signature? And if so, how do I find it?

So finally, after a decade of musing over this, I called and asked him to expound on his theory.

“Dedicated photographers invariably have it when they’re photographing intuitively from within themselves over a long, long period of time,” he said. “A style or compositional tendency, whatever you want to call it, will organically emerge from that devotion.” But this can only happen, he added, when the photographer is able to work “without excessive supervision.”

But how does a photographer go about finding it?

****Check back tomorrow for part two.