Part II – All About Access – How I Got The Picture

In my last post about how I got a picture of the Ku Klux Klan at a cross lighting ceremony, I mentioned that I would write another post about how I got another picture. This is the photograph I was referring to:

This photograph was taken at a rally held by the National Socialist Movement which supports the principles of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. The rally took place on the steps of the Capitol Building in Lansing, Michigan. This is how I came to be given exclusive access to photograph the group up close.

After shooting a few KKK events, I wanted to explore other racist groups that existed in the United States. While doing my research on the internet, the National Socialist Movement featured prominently in my search results. So I checked out their web site and saw that they regularly held rallies and meetings in various parts of the country. Naturally (for me), I wanted to go and photograph one. Now I know that there are those who will say something like “…all you are doing is giving the NSM the exposure they are looking for…”. You could look at it that way. On the other hand, in the time since I took these photographs, I have never heard that. What I have heard more than anything else is “…wow, I NEVER realized that this still went on in the United States today. That’s shocking…” which is more the reaction I was looking for.

Anyway, I managed to make contact with the commander of the NSM and he agreed to let me come along, with a group of other people from the media, to an event that they were holding at Yorktown Battlefield in Virginia. I didn’t make it. The previous day I had to shoot the NextFest event in Chicago for a European magazine. I figured I could fly to Washington DC’s Dulles Airport and drive down to Yorktown in plenty of time for the event. BUT… the traffic around DC can be worse that the traffic around Los Angeles. It is CRAZY! How can a capital city run effectively when there is such incredible gridlock even on weekends? In other words, after several frustrating hours on the road, I arrived at the event WAY too late to join the media in the main enclosure, and instead had to view the proceedings from a great distance, with a group of protesters. I was a little shocked at the negative reception that the media received as they were dismissed from the event and walked back towards the protesters.

When I arrived back at my hotel in Chicago, that evening, I contacted the commander again. “No problem,” he said, and he went on to tell me of the Lansing event coming up in the future. I aimed to get to that one in plenty of time…

One thing that I had to try and convince the commander of was, once again, my objectivity. There are those among us, my colleagues, who will scoff at the thought of genuine objectivity, saying that it is impossible to achieve that. In some ways I agree. Then again, although I was able to confirm that I would remain entirely objective in my reporting and photographing of the NSM event, the very fact that I was covering it, and sharing the photographs with any viewers around the world who cared to view them, was enough to suggest that I felt the need to highlight the NSM’s activities. My aim is to provide visual information for others to view, and allow them to make up their own minds. Also, consider that sales of these photographs have been far greater throughout Europe, and negligible in the United States apart from a front page slot on the MSNBC web site.

So I headed to Lansing and checked in to a good hotel just blocks from the Capitol Building. I was NOT going to miss this event. I actually arrived two days early and spent the first full day after my arrival shooting the demolition of a nearby GM car manufacturing plant – a sad thing to see in America’s heartland.

Early on the morning of the NSM rally, I headed over to the Capital Building to see riot fencing being put up, and metal detectors being installed. A large group of protestors was expected and the local TV channels had already reported on the up coming event during the morning news hour. But I didn’t know how I would be able to join the group and get on to the other side of the riot fencing.

Two hours before the event was due to start, I got a call from the commander. “Are we still on?” I asked.

“Where are you?’ he replied.

“In Lansing.”

“OK. Here’s what you do.”

He gave me directions out of the city and to a rest stop on a nearby freeway. I headed out there and waited. The rest stop was way out in a rural area of Lansing and you could only just make out the city skyline between the trees. As the minutes ticked by, a few cars started to trickle in, stop, and wait – nobody getting out. I noticed that the cars had a piece of paper stuck in the rear window with “88″ printed on it. I later learned that this represented “Heil Hitler” with “h” being the eighth letter of the alphabet.

After 30 minutes or so, there was a convoy forming and people starting to get out of their vehicles, wearing stormtrooper uniforms and swastika armbands or t-shirts. I got out of my car and recognized the commander from photographs that I had seen. I went over and introduced myself.

Those who had gathered were formed up in to two military-style columns and orders were given. We were to drive in convoy to a location some miles away which was a police staging area. This would allow the group to park their cars in a secret location so that they would not get vandalized during the rally. The police would then search everyone before boarding buses that would take us to the back entrance of the Capitol Building in Lansing. No questions.

Soon, we were driving in a convoy of thirty plus vehicles, all, apart from mine, with that “88″ in the rear window. We ended up in an even more rural area, accessible from a series of country lanes out of view from the nearest highway. Everyone parked up as directed by the heavy police presence. Three buses were parked nearby and as the group made its way over to them, everyone was stopped and searched. During this time, I started to take photographs which led some of the NSM group to think that I was also a policeman. It was only when I was also searched (the very last one) and boarded a bus, that they realized I was “with them”.

The buses took us back in to Lansing, driving through a double line of riot fencing, and drawing up near the rear entrance to the Capitol. Each bus disgorged its load of nazi-uniformed passengers, and one photojournalist, and everyone filed past a large crowd of TV crews, photographers, and reporters from local and national media outlets. It felt very odd being photographed as a part of the “subject” but there was also a certain, selfish, and entirely childish smug satisfaction that they were all being held back behind a certain line while I had free access to everything behind the scenes.

The inside of the Capitol Building was very ornate, typical old-style, government building architecture, in a good way. The NSM group formed up along one corridor to receive instructions and await the right time for the start of the rally. I was shooting all the time. There are some photographs I took which are really offensive so I am not going to show them here.  I do have a slideshow of this event available via my main web site at www.newchannelmedia.com.

About thirty minutes after we all arrived, the group marched out to the front of the Capitol Building and formed up on the steps. As they marched out, jeers and shouts went up from the crowd, gathered about 200 feet away, behind the riot fencing.

Over the next hour, different members of the NSM leadership spoke to the crowd, some comments were primarily political in nature, while others were taunting and clearly racially biased. But the comments were not purely about hatred for no apparent reason. Everything that was said had been carefully thought-out, and came across as clearly articulated statements.

The crowd of protesters proclaimed their distaste for the speeches, and the very presence of the NSM, as loudly as they could, and a few scuffles broke out with mounted policemen. But the speeches ended, the group filed back in to the Capitol Building, boarded the buses, and returned to their cars. There was a general air of congratulation on the bus that I traveled back on, and sharing of stories about other rallies that had taken place where there had been a more direct and violent response from protesters.

Back at the remote, police-controlled parking lot, NSM members posed for photographs, shared notes, shook hands, and slowly departed. I thanked the commander for the access he had given me and made my way back to my hotel.

It felt a little surreal to have been in Lansing as part of a group that had received a hostile reception, and then return there by myself, to resume my hotel stay like any other guest. Pasta was washed down with a couple of beers while I edited, captioned, and filed the images to my agency. As the ftp program was sending the jpgs, I compared the NSM event with the KKK event from some months earlier. One thing that I thought was that the KKK event had the makings of a family affair, with children mingling and playing together, while the adults shared stories, donned their uniforms, and lit their cross. But with the NSM event, children were very much a part of the activities…

As with the KKK, I have since been invited back to photograph other NSM events and I plan to do so at some stage. As I mentioned in the KKK post, I am one of the least racially-biased people around, and I firmly believe that if you claim to operate “objectively” as a journalist, then any sort of bias is going to work against you. However, as human beings, we all have opinions, and we are told, from a young age, that we are entitled to those opinions. I am happy to allow anyone to have their opinions, however right or wrong I think that they might be, as long as they don’t force them on me. Sure, share with me what you believe, tell me what you are passionate about, chat about the strong feelings you have, and I will listen; I may even represent those beliefs and opinions photographically. But don’t expect me to accept or conform to them.

One point worthy of consideration regards the first amendment – the right to free speech. At many of the major protests and riots that I have photographed in the US, the first amendment is quoted, especially when police in riot gear are trying to shut down a group of protesters. The NSM members also talked about the first amendment. They are all US citizens and reserve their right to free speech. But where is the line drawn between free speech and defamation? Perhaps there is another story to develop there…

All About Access – How I Got The Picture

I have had some emails, recently, from people asking me how I got this photograph:

This is a fairly recent KKK event in a rural region of Arkansas. A few months prior to this event, I had developed an interest in the continued existence of racism in a modern society and decided to do some on-line research in to the matter.

Over the months, I attended one KKK rally in Tennessee (on Martin Luther King Day) at which I shot this image:

But this was at a fairly low-key public event and I wanted to dive deeper in to this subject. Over time, I came across announcements for events occurring throughout the United States, many in the south and mid-west of the country. Eventually, I found details of a “cross-lighting” that was due to occur in Arkansas. I tried to contact the webmaster of the site where these details were posted, but had no luck doing so. Not being willing to take “no response” for an answer, I booked a flight to El Dorado for the weekend of the event.

The travel, itself, was quite an experience – I never realized how small some of United’s planes were. But after a day of travel, I touched down at the tiny airport of El Dorado and was the only person to disembark the tiny aircraft (leaving about 7 others on-board, at near-full capacity!).

Although the airport was, for all intents and purposes, closed, I had arranged for a rental car and there, right on time, was a rental car agent to swipe my credit card and hand over the keys. The service was better and faster than that of the much larger rental car firms at major international airports.

The following day, I headed out to where I figured the KKK rally was going to be held. At 2:00pm, the first vehicles started to turn up. I went up to the closed gate and spoke with two men, dressed all in black with KKK insignia on their t-shirts, and automatics strapped around their waists, and asked how I might be able to get in to photograph them. I was not sure what response I would get from them – extreme violence, hysterical laughter, or something in between. What I was not expecting was for them to be helpful.

One of the two spoke in to a walkie-talkie and soon another, bigger guy came cruising across the field, driving an ATV. He smiled and asked me what I wanted. I told him that I wanted to photograph the cross-lighting and any other activities that might be going on. He asked me why. Now I know that these people are very sensitive to negative press and there was no way I would ever have been allowed in if I had hinted that my photographs would be used to support criticism of their group. So I had to be completely clear about my objective approach to taking photographs. In all honesty, I told him that I realize their organization comes in for a lot of negative press. However, my job was to mix with them, shoot their activities, caption the photographs objectively, and present the results to viewers in a variety of media, letting them make their own decisions about what they are seeing.

Now let me make one thing clear – I have to be one of the least racist people around. I lived in South Africa for two years and came way too close to the ugliness of racism to ever want to be a part of it. Then again, as a journalist and photojournalist, I have an obligation to report on things that I might not always support. In fact, I feel that it is more important to show images about topics that ARE uncomfortable for people to see.

The big guy thought about what I said for a few seconds, then said “No. Sorry. We’ve had a lot of trouble with journalists so I cannot let you in.”

“OK,” I replied. “But I can take whatever photographs I want from this road, right? I mean, this is a public highway and I have every right to be here.” He agreed, climbed back on to his ATV, and went back to the distant tents.

I walked over to a nearby tree stump, unpacked a long lens, and got comfortable.

But a few moments later, the ATV came shooting across the field again. The two guards on the gate opened it, and the big guy came over to me.

“Are you serious about being really objective about what you see?”

“Of course.”

“OK. You can come in. But NO CAMERAS. You will have to leave them in the trunk of your car.”

Great! A step in the right direction. For the next several hours, I hung out with a growing crowd of KKK people, all in regular street clothes. Many of them traveled from quite far away for this event, which was part social gathering and part racial activism. I was offered a bowl of gumbo. “What’s in it?” I asked. “Potato, rice, and squirrel” was the response. I said I’d think about it…

As the afternoon wore on, several of the men were involved in wrapping a large wooden cross in rags doused with diesel fuel. The cross was then inserted in a hole in the ground and secured there. Night fell and the big guy came over to me. He had seen that I had spent the time asking questions of those in the group, and had been willing to talk to people about my own thoughts and opinions, which they had taken surprisingly well.

The big guy told me that he had discussed this with others in the group and they had agreed that I could take photographs of the cross-lighting, but only after everybody was “hooded up”. YES!!

I went over to my car and extracted my cameras. No flash could be used here. Two Canon bodies, a 16-35mm f/2.8 and a 24-70mm f/2.8. That was it. Soon after I hung my cameras over my shoulders, one of the several armed guards came over to me. “I’ll trade you this pistol for your camera,” he claimed.

“How much did the pistol cost you?” I asked.

“$350.”

I removed the memory card from one of the cameras and handed it to him. “This is what that will buy you.”

He walked away in disappointment (without the memory card).

By now it was dark. A few speeches were made and the crowd was told about my presence, that I was allowed to take photographs. “If you don’t want your faces photographed, put your hoods on,” was the instruction. Soon after, the ceremony started. The whole thing lasted no more than twenty minutes so I shot away as best I could, caught up in the moment and relishing the access.

That’s how I got the shot.

When all was done, I said goodbye to everyone and headed back to my hotel, making sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone. Over a few Coronas and a tube of Pringles, I ran my memory cards through my digital workflow, edited, captioned, and filed. Another job done.

Gold Miner or Film Director?

Chatting with a very talented photojournalism student, last week, we got on to the subject of visual story-telling. The student told me that he had been talking to a very successful photojournalist (no names but think West African oil). The student was surprised when the photojournalist told him that he did not do any of his own editing. His job, as he saw it, was to go out and take pictures, to be the “gold miner”, bringing back the raw materials, which would then be “refined” by somebody else, to tell a story.

We continued talking about this and the student mentioned a local, well established, newspaper photographer who had a similar approach to working.

The reason I raise this is that it, quite frankly, surprised me. When I go and shoot a subject, I do so with a story in mind, with a message that I want to deliver. I am there, in the moment, developing those relationships with the subject, establishing some level of intimacy with them. I believe that experiencing that connection with the subject is essential to telling their story effectively. It helps me to understand the context and perspective of the message I am trying to deliver and allows me to do a better job of doing so. There is no way that I could just hand over a folder of jpgs for someone else to figure out. I do not know what it would take to effectively share my experience, my emotions with the subject at the time of photographing them, with another person who would then go on to produce a story. I want to be the story teller and I think that I am the best qualified to tell the stories that I capture.

In our conversation, we evolved the analogy of gold miner/refiner to that of film director/cameraman. What do you want to do, be the one who captures the images or the one who tells the story (or both)?

Certainly with the emergence of multimedia and the inclusion of video as fundamental components of photojournalism, maintaining end-to-end control of the story-making process seems to becoming more critical to a photojournalist’s success. There will always be those who have the preference or opportunity to just concern themselves with taking great pictures, and an increasing number of those who maintain that story-telling control with almost every project they work on. Maybe this divergence (if it is a divergence) will require a reclassification of photographer titles.

Picture taker or story teller? Which are you?

Equipment Horrors and Walter Reed

Just came across Vincent Laforet’s very interesting blog post about preparing for his trip to Beijing to photograph the Olympics – sounds HORRIFIC!! He put up a gallery to show the packing process. Fascinating stuff.

Makes me so happy that I get to take shots like this (at Walter Reed) with one camera body and one lens…

This is Army Sergeant Tim Johannsen (wheelchair) and Army Sergeant Joel Dulashanti (roller blades) at the Military Advanced Training Center PT Clinic at Walter Reed. They both lost parts of lower limbs to IED’s and/or EFP’s (explosive formed penetrators) while serving in Iraq. Tim lives on the Walter Reed campus with his wife and Joel lives in an apartment a few floors above where he is standing now.

What amazed me the most about meeting these two, and many others during my visit to Walter Reed, was their sense of camaraderie, of community, and of hope for the future. I mostly saw smiling faces, people working hard to recover from their injuries and get back to a normal life.

Speaking with the liaison officer who escorted me around the facility, it was clear that many times when a press photographer visits the facility, the story seems to be more about the photographer getting a spectacular shot and less about the benefit to the subjects. By going in with just a minimum of equipment (Canon EOS 1Ds mkII and a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens), I was less obtrusive and more approachable. It was easy to strike up conversations with almost everybody I met which quickly resulted in a willingness to have a photograph taken.

I really do not envy Vincent or those hundreds of other photographers who have to go to China to photograph sporting activities. Give me a minimalist approach to a heart-wrenching story anyday.

Martin Parr: Why Photojournalism Must “Get Modern”

Here, Martin Parr shares some thoughts on how to make photojournalism more effective again, a topic very close to my own heart and a fundamental component of my current and future photojournalism projects.

From PDNOnline

July 31, 2008

British photographer Martin Parr, whose work straddles documentary and fine art photography, argues that photojournalism “has to get modern” to regain the attention and support of mainstream magazines. In this month’s “State of the Art Report: Photojournalism Survival” (PDN August), Parr asserts, “You have to disguise things as entertainment, but still leave a message and some poignancy.” In a recent interview, we asked him to elaborate on his theory.

PDN: How do you disguise documentary photography as entertainment?
Martin Parr: I went recently to the Beijing car show. It struck me as being a very interesting place to look at [the new world order]. Obviously the explosion of cars in China is a big issue. The best way to illustrate that is to go to the car show where you see people and cars together in huge quantities. I’m unlikely to get that commissioned. I just decided to go anyway, and got Magnum Photos [Parr's agency] to help me fund it.

PDN: How did your approach to that project differ from a more traditional photojournalistic approach?
M.P.: I’m not waiting to be assigned. I go to places I want to go and see how they fit in. If I wait for the phone to ring, for me to go to the places I want to go, it’s not going to happen. So I determine where I want to go, and then try to get the magazines to help. If I do something about the Chinese car show, I can mention that there are 9 million new cars on the road in China this year alone. You can bring in your agenda with weird pictures of the car girls, or with images of people photographing cars. To me, dealing with the issues of the new world order is absolutely fascinating. Potentially magazines and newspapers will run those pictures, not in the traditional sense that I’m a campaigning photojournalist. I’m not going out doing campaigning photojournalism, because nobody wants that anymore. You have a few people that commission that—Newsweek and Time, for example—but there are very few opportunities there unless you’re at the top end.

PDN: What do you mean by campaigning photojournalism?
M.P.: The more traditional humanistic approach as personified in the older Magnum, for example. We still have within magnum photographers who take that approach, but even they give it a new spin, like Paolo Pellegrin for example. They make eloquent poetic pictures that people want to run. I shoot interesting subject matter but disguise it as entertainment. That’s what people want in magazines. I like to play the game where you can get interesting ideas in, but almost in disguise.

PDN: So what’s the message you disguise in the Beijing car show images?
M.P.: The message is ambiguous and open ended. I’m not preaching. I’m not saying the phenomenal growth of cars is entirely right or wrong. Like everything in the world, there’s a good side and a bad side. There is the old approach, whereby you try to change the world. Nobody is going to obliterate war, famine, AIDS, and all the other things that are the usual subject matter that more campaigning photojournalists would be attracted to. I’m not pretending that my going to the Beijing car show will influence whether more people buy cars, but it gives me chance to bring onto the agenda a place and situation that I think is interesting.

PDN: Has Magnum found venues for these pictures?
M.P.: I’m bound to in the end get a good folio of these images published. Another story I did last October was about millionaires in Moscow. I did the Gulf art fair. All these things in the end have been quite beneficial to me in terms of sales. And they’re constantly adding to my portfolio of work. It’s a big jigsaw puzzle I’m trying to work out as we go along about my relationship to the world we live in.

PDN: So global capitalism is the central theme?
M.P.: It’s one of the things I’m interested in. I’ve been doing a set of pictures called Luxury. Wealth to me is as much to me the front line as poverty traditionally was.

PDN: You’ve never taken a traditional approach to photojournalism, have you?
M.P.: I don’t regard myself particularly as a photojournalist. I’m a documentary photographer. The idea of my work is to try put my finger on the zeitgeist of what’s happening. That’s constantly changing and shifting. I’m not interested in photographing things that are disappearing, although I’ve engaged in a slight bit of nostalgia. I’m interested in things as they are now.

PDN: Are you seeing other photographers taking an entertainment approach?
M.P.: I don’t really know. I see degrees of some overlap with some of my colleagues at Magnum and other photographers. Despite the fact that everyone says photography in newspapers and magazines is dead, I think if you’re ingenious…you have got to be a lot more ingenious these days to get commissioned and to get editors and photo editors excited. Simon Norfolk does a very good job of dealing with wars and war zones in a different way. He has a very good relationship with The New York Times Magazine. Within Magnum, Alec Soth is very successful as you know. He can get work on his own terms. That’s the idea: you have a voice, style, and approach and you get commissions to fulfill that. I’m currently working on the biggest assignment I’ve ever had. I’m doing ten 16-page supplements about different British cities. It’s expanding the idea of an editorial assignment into something much bigger, with all genres: editorial, cultural, books, exhibitions. All the boundaries are blurring if you play the game well. It’s new to everyone involved, and it gives me a fantastic platform to publish pictures I want to.

PDN: So we can talk about all these alternative channels, but if you don’t have a distinctive point of view, you aren’t going to get access to them, are you?
M.P.: It’s a highly competitive market. Clearly one of the things that potentially distinguishes you is that you have a known voice in photography.

PDN: Which is easier said than done…
M.P.: I agree. But nonetheless picture editors like to commission new, exciting photographers. They’ll take that risk. Of course, it’s not easy. If it was easy then everybody would be at it. There are more magazines now than ever before. But they have to be filled with something. I agree that I’m in a better position than most. I’m in is a very privileged position, and it has taken years to get there.

PDN: How do you get there?
M.P.: A lot of times photographers don’t have enough imagination in terms of what subject matter is going to appeal to editors. A good idea and good story, well executed, is going to have a much better chance than a tired old story. Most photographers don’t really think about what they’re shooting. There are certain expectations about what photographers should shoot, and they stick to that.

PDN: What advice would you give them to get out of that rut?
M.P.: It’s very difficult. You have to be more ingenious, you have to think carefully about the appeal that your subject will have and how it will fit into a modern magazine that’s going to shy away from a more traditional humanistic approach. How to make it look interesting, and entertaining, and at same time have a level of poignancy and zeitgeist: I can’t tell people how to do it, can I? In the end, it comes down to the personality and individuality of photographer to express that. But when people say to me the magazine market is dead, I just don’t believe it.

–interview by David Walker