Would you go in front of the lens?

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Would you, dear reader, let a photographer into your life?

Considering Columbia has been over-saturated with journalists since the establishment of the School of Journalism in 1908, many of you have probably been photographed by the Missourian or an eager student.

But I speak of allowing a photographer to have deeper access to the private moments of your life. Would you truly allow a photographer access to your private, intimate moments — for weeks or months at a time?

And if you would, why?

I’ve been asking myself — along with people who have been photo subjects — these questions for the past five months.

I’ve been researching the 61st Missouri Photo Workshop, which took place in September 2009 in Festus and Crystal City and the people who let these workshop photographers into their lives.

The workshop serves as a microcosm for the documentary photojournalistic experience. In one week, a photographer must find a photo story and then spend morning until night with their subject.

As a journalist, I ask to see the most intimate, emotional and sometimes difficult moments of my subject’s life — all in the name of getting the story.

As a photojournalist, this is an even bigger undertaking.

A writer does not need, per se, to bear witness to these moments — for them to be recalled in an interview is enough. But a photojournalist must view and capture these moments in real time.

I was told ad nauseam throughout my education, “People want to have their story told,” but I was suspicious that this was not the case; As much as I loved journalism— I suspected that the profession was infected with a light strain of opportunistic voyeurism.

The nine photo story subjects I interviewed all described the experience as being awkward at first. One of my interviewees, Annette Bauman, said multiple times that she’s “not a picture person.”

Most said that it became less awkward as the week went on, as they became accustomed to their photographer and being in front of the lens.

Jason and Sara O’Shea, who homeschool their four children, were photographed during the workshop by photographer Michele Kraus. The O’Sheas said the experience became a family-like affair.

“I think it very quickly stopped feeling like someone was at our house doing a documentary,” Jason O’Shea said. “It more felt like we had a family member over that we don’t get to see a lot, so she wanted to take a lot of pictures ... I know that it sounds silly, she (Kraus) was only here three or four days, but it was almost like she was more of a little sister and she was just taking pictures of family.”

Jason O’Shea thought the photos that were taken by Kraus were “phenomenal.”

“They capture what our life is really about,” O’Shea said. “I guess in a way (the photos) made a difference because I realized that when I look at those pictures, they really do capture a lot of what is important to me and that helped me to realize, I guess, that the direction our lives are going is the direction I want them to go. ...I felt the pictures were, to a great extent, an affirmation of the fact that our life is really what I want it to be.”

Private moments were also photographed. Laverne Austin, a resident of Crystal City who lives with a rare form of multiple sclerosis was photographed by John Liau during the workshop.

“John didn’t mind coming in the bedroom,” Austin said. “I’d be getting ready to put something on and the he’d be with his camera going, click click click. I’d say, ‘How long have you been here? I’m going to tell on you to your fiancé.’”

To me, the most amazing story I heard was that of the Bauman family. Annette and Josh Bauman have two sons, Jackson and Kade.  Kade, who is now 2 years old, could not support his head, crawl or talk because of multiple medical conditions including epilepsy, cortical vision impairment and hypotonia. The Baumans allowed their photographer, Julia Robinson, to visit the emergency room with them when  Kade had a seizure.

“It was cool of Julia to come to the ER with us,” Josh Bauman said. “Trips to the hospital with Kade are intense. She didn’t back down, she went right with it. ...We thought it was going to get difficult when we went to the ER because hospitals are picky — we thought it may get hairy, but they didn’t mind. ...We wouldn’t have agreed to do it if there was going to be something off limits.”

I’ve been photographed by classmates as a class exercise, but I wonder every time I send a Missourian photographer out on assignment if I would say yes to a photographer in a similar situation. If it was my nine-year-old brother in the hospital, would it be OK with me?

What it comes down to for me is this: The power of these stories is extraordinary. They have the power to inform, to enlighten, to show and examine the nature of human emotion. One could (and I have) debate the measurable effect of these stories but I believe that revealing a common humanity is the highest cause that could exist. Photo stories are unique in their ability to do this.

If my story had the capacity to exhibit something so true, how could I possibly say no?

What would you say?

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. She volunteered twice for the Missouri Photo Workshop, and she is weeks away from completing her master’s project about the people who were photographed during the 2009 MPW in Festus and Crystal City.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Friday, June 18, 2010.

Dispatches from Missouri's Twin City

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

FESTUS, Mo. — Festus and Crystal City have histories so intertwined that a Walmart store happily sits on the border between them (and the cities share the sales tax). Crystal City, population 4,549, is nestled on the Mississippi River about 34 miles south of St. Louis. Festus is due west of Crystal City, essentially trapping the latter against the river on the east and the town of Herculaneum to the north. These two small towns share an identity as the Twin City, although the tension of “us versus them” remains.

I am here as a member of the digital darkroom crew of the Missouri Photo Workshop, a yearly, weeklong boot camp in documentary photography put on by the Missouri School of Journalism. This year 31 workshop participants, 13 faculty members and 20-some MU student-volunteers (that’s me) have descended upon Festus and Crystal City to document and hopefully shed photographic light on this place.

I find it an odd contradiction in journalism that those who hold the pen (or camera, in this case) are expected to explain another person’s truth in so little time. How can one-hundredth of a second, a click of the shutter, one photo (or maybe five or seven) be expected to tell the entire truth of someone’s story?

This is the rub: A documentary photo is not BIG TRUTH. It is the truth of the moment. Part of the workshop is learning to narrow the story the photos are telling so that the moments do tell the story. A photograph is a slice of time, made static. Or as author and critic Susan Sontag wrote, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

I think what we are really doing here in Festus is enabling a visual anthropology through documentary photography. We're trying to look at the world as it is today — to look at this town — and to find and preserve the one-hundredths of a second that will collectively reveal a sense of what is happening here now.

Workshop participants have been documenting small-town Missouri for 61 years.  At first the idea was to tell the big story of the town hosting the workshop, but it eventually found the form it uses today, for each photographer to tell a smaller, more personal story. The result is an emergence of understanding, a synergy of individual photos that make up individual stories that in turn create a portrait of the town that is greater than the sum of its parts.

“A great photograph poses more questions than it answers,” said David Rees, the workshop co-director, head of the MU photojournalism department and all-around Yoda. The process of making these photo stories is not really to present the meaning of life, but to challenge viewers to search for it.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and a current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism and is currently volunteering on the multimedia team for the 61st Missouri Photo Workshop in Festus and Crystal City.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, September 30, 2009.

Show me the photos!

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

While the news cycle has moved on to President Barack Obama’s trip to Cairo and family vacation in Paris, the executive branch of our government stopped the release of photographs showing prisoner abuse by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan last month and the public has yet to see hide or hair of those photos.

In his speech at the National Archives in Washington on May 21, Obama said, “It was my judgment — informed by my national security team — that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning, and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.”  That’s a fine sentiment: We do have a national interest in protecting our military men and women serving in active combat duty. But I’m not so sure they’d thank us for this favor.

Considering the poor reputation that the United States has gained in our dalliances abroad in the past eight years, how could these particular photos make it any worse for our troops? It is a larger shame that our nation’s military asked the troops to perpetrate in such a way as to betray the moral high ground on which this nation was founded. As a nation we cannot truly understand and overcome the specter of prisoner abuses unless we face the images that those abuses created.

Seeing is believing, as the saying goes, and there is nothing like confronting photographs of atrocities to crystallize truth. The role of the photograph is to provide evidence of a moment in time and to challenge the status quo in ways worded documents fall short.

America faced a similar crisis in 2004, when photographs of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light. Susan Sontag, the author and critic wrote in “Regarding the Pain of Others:” “The meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show.” Americans were quicker to condemn such actions in light of photographic evidence.

In the same May 21 speech, the president spoke of his decision to uphold the rule of law and release memos detailing the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: torture) used at Guantanamo Bay. Obama said: “There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world.” This highlights a dichotomy in the perception of media: Why are the memos acceptable for public discussion and debate, while photographs of prisoner abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan are not? How are the memos less dangerous to our troops than the photographs?

In the end, the danger of inflaming anti-American opinion abroad and increasing the danger of American military personnel already in perilous situations is more theoretical than imminent. It is far more dangerous to let the photographs of whatever happened at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan lie in darkness than to let them come to light.

“We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe,” President Obama said. Attempting to hold back these photographs – these potentially damning photographs – from public scrutiny is a betrayal of America’s professed cherished values. To shield the public from knowledge that would increase understanding of a war that has been muddled from the beginning is a shame. Show us the photos, Mr. President, and we will be a better country for it.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Monday, June 10, 2009.