How do you photograph sadness?
It’s been a week full of doubts, like an army of pins and needles invading my thoughts, a week of difficult parenting, a week of not taking any pictures, of feeling more alone than usual. The sadness comes and goes, amid the joys and the chores, and I don’t know how to photograph it.
How does a photograph convey a feeling?
Back when I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism’s PhotoJ sequence, photographs were a tool of journalism and photojournalism was to be objective above all else. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” - but a photograph of a pipe is a pipe and that is that.
This is not a pipe. This is not sadness, it is a photograph of my son as he wakes up, slowly, in a darkened room. This is not sadness, because sadness is not in the photograph but in the photographer’s heart - and maybe the viewer’s eye. The dogma of the PhotoJ school’s founding fathers, the cardinal rules of objectivity, observation and storytelling, the fly on the wall approach to being a photographer, the unbiased, impartial and obsessively objective witness to life’s travails, big and small, was what we strove for all those twenty-or-so years ago, our gold standard, and yet even then it was debated and deconstructed and I belonged to those who thought it was all a lot more complicated than that, Roland Barthes and all, and that objectivity could hide emotion and opinion and intimate vision, and that it always did, in fact.
The photographs of The Hunt, Visura grant’s winning story, make up a reportage on hunting in an unforgiving environment, yes, but they are also, they are most of all an intimate and subjective portrait of unbearable beauty and poetry.
As I strive to redefine my life as a single mother and photographer amid sadness and mundane challenges, I am reminded that photography is how I go through the world but that is could also be my salvation, the way out of sadness and into the light.
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