Making Sense of Missouri

The Missouri Photo Workshop came and went like a dream. It was a suspension of everything in my life I consider to be normal and familiar. It was a shock, a marathon, a jump start, the kind of approach to learning that I am increasingly moving away from, but maybe still has some relevance in helping me understand what I want and don't want out of a career in photography.

Before I left for Missouri, I had a hard time easing into the idea of throwing myself into that kind of situation. Everyone I talked to who'd done the workshop said it had made them cry -- I was fine with crying, in fact, I enjoy the purge, the release of crying -- but I didn't want to feel beaten down, get the wind knocked out of me, like most intense and intensive educational experiences have left me feeling. I did a workshop earlier this summer that I walked away from feeling a lot smaller than I did going into it. I used to think this kind of boot camp experience was the only way I could be motivated to learn, but I am beginning to understand that my own desire to learn is really the only tool I need. When I want to learn or achieve something, the resources seem to sort themselves out.

Even after coming to that realization, I was nervous as hell the day before I left, having fits of nausea where I couldn't keep down anything I ate, thinking to myself, oh God, what if I can't pull this off? I'd applied for this workshop at a time in my life -- just a few months ago -- when I felt like I still needed to be pushed by others in order to learn anything or to get anything done. I had been accepted, I'd paid, and now I must go through with it and make the most of it. That night, I drove up to my family's house in the Napa Valley in an effort to calm myself, and ended up sleeping under the stars in a hammock in the middle of the forest. Somehow seeing the vastness of the night sky, which I'd felt overwhelmed and fearful of about a year ago, soothed me in that it helped me look at this workshop experience, however it turned out, from a greater perspective. If I failed, if I didn't find a story to shoot, if I didn't get along with my instructors, then oh well. Nobody would die.

When I arrived in Clinton, the trembling and nausea having stepped politely aside, I began to think to myself that maybe I was up for this after all. I met my other team members, my team leaders, or "editors" as they are referred to at MPW, Barbara Davidson and Dennis Dimick, and it seemed less daunting now that it was happening, now that I was doing it.

During my first meeting with my editors, I remember Dennis asked me what my background was and why I was interested in photography. Giving an answer mattered less to me than the fact that he actually asked me, and cared enough to listen to my answer. Few people had straight up asked me that question before, and it felt like such a relief that I didn't feel the need to beat it over the their heads, to justify myself. I explained my reasons, as coherently as I knew how, and they seemed to make perfect sense to both of them. Pretty cool, I remember thinking. I didn't have to work hard to be around these people.

I decided to shoot a project about coming of age in a small town. It was going to be a simple story, and I decided at the beginning of the week that I didn't care about impressing anyone with my ability to gain access to something deep, dark, and dramatic. Whether it impresses anyone or not, I've already done that, not to mention that I feel like I need more than a week to do that kind of story. I wanted to go back to the basics of good old fashioned storytelling: characters, setting, themes, narrative, and finding the visual cues to describe and evoke these elements.

The scariest thing about documentary photography for me is making initial contact with my subjects. But I did what I needed to do in order to overcome my fear, to make myself feel more at ease with the idea of gaining access to someone's most private moments. I rode a bike around town. I took baths. I went swimming and hung out in the hot tub at the hotel. I listened to Roy Harper and Joanna Newsom as I walked to and from the workshop headquarters. Taking my time to do what I needed to do to feel at ease in a potentially stressful situation helped me face my fears in a way that made them feel less like fears, or like chores, or like something I had to do for someone else, or "for my own good." And my story came together in a way I was reasonably happy with.

The most important lesson I learned from this workshop was that I need to feel good in order to want to photograph, to feel inspired to get myself out the door, and to make pictures that I feel happy about. I now am beginning to apply this to my long-term project here in San Francisco on a story that does happen to be deep, dark and dramatic. And so the journey continues...