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.

The problem with Facebook photos

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I was an early adopter of Facebook.com. It became popular in 2004, my freshman year of college. This was before all the colleges and universities in the U.S. were able to register, and a few years before Facebook was open to everyone. So, most of my kind-of-adult social life has been influenced by the social networking culture that Facebook has spawned.

This means almost constant awareness of the danger of Facebook photos. Any photo taken of me (or you) in any condition, can be uploaded and shared with the world, regardless of my (or your) preference. Facebook, in its own way, encourages the proliferation of images, no matter how inane or embarrassing the images might be.

Most people I know who are not members of the photo nerd brigade upload as many photos as they can to Facebook — unlike other digital photo upload sites such as Flickr or Photobucket, Facebook does not have a limit. Some people literally upload every frame they take with their digital cameras, without restraint.

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing — which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art,” author and critic Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.  “It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety and a tool of power.”

Facebook is the equivalent of being stuck in a friend’s vacation slideshow. Do I really need to see every photo someone took at a party, including images of one person with their arms around every single person in attendance? Or, every single frame of a friend’s vacation to Iowa City?

“Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had,” Sontag wrote. “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” This is a shame.

Photography should not be a means through which a person experiences life. It takes a person out of the moment, and anesthetizes the life experience, putting distance between the person behind the camera lens and their life. I am in the business of providing photographic proof for this fine newspaper, the Missourian. I know aspiring professionals who live and breathe photography — and I know a few who can’t function without a camera in their hands and their eyes looking through the viewfinder.

Why do people need indisputable proof that they had a good time? And furthermore, why do people need 120 frames of said photographic proof?

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” Sontag wrote. “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies.” It is a socialized compulsion to photograph one’s life. There is a sense that if it is not photographed, it did not happen. Facebook plays into this insecurity — if the photos are not on Facebook, it must have been a boring evening.

But any serious documentary photographer knows that things happen outside of the camera’s gaze all the time. Photographers speak of capturing “the moment” or “the peak action” of an event — the best and most visual slice of time, with the most visceral visual emotion, the 1/125 of a second that tells the story. This is a hard task. It is more than having your friend say “cheese” or standing under the Gateway Arch. There are no do-overs, no posing. Photographers miss the moment all the time, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

So I ask for some discretion from the public. No one needs to see 200 photographs from the party last night. Take it easy, shutterbug. Pick, say, five images. Or better yet, leave the camera at home and have a good time without it.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is a Facebook user, but posts photos to her blog.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 5, 2009.