On Observation

Find a space - anywhere - and describe what you see with a pencil in a notebook. Pay attention to the details, the textures, sounds, dialogue, odours, the light….. and repeat. When you read through your notes can you reconstruct or imagine that moment in time? Will someone who wasn’t there be able to do the same?

I think that the best way to learn how to photograph is to learn how to observe, the best way to learn how to observe is to write, and the best way to learn how to write is to read. The books below are masterpieces of observation.

Some of these books changed how I saw, what I chose to look at, and altered the way I expressed myself, in images and words. They are all quite different, written many years apart. There is no intended meaning to the overall curation and it is not definitive. I urge you read these works mindful of the place and time in which they were written, and by whom - the same must be said of photography - there is no other way to understand them. This curation will be updated from time to time.

Landscape: Everything that happens, happens somewhere.

The Peregrine by J.A Baker

This book was given to me by Sam James, who gave a copy to many people because he was so convinced everyone should read it. It changed the way I see, and think about description. Bakers obsession, his dedication and commitment, his power of observation, craft and use of language are some of the reasons why this is one of the most profoundly inspiring books I have ever read.

An excerpt from the book:

“Cold air rises from the ground as the sun goes down. The eye-burning clarity of the light intensifies. The southern rim of the sky glows to a deeper blue, to pale violet, to purple, then thins to grey. Slowly the wind falls, and the still air begins to freeze. The solid eastern ridge is black; it has a bloom on it like the dust on the skin of a grape. The west flares briefly. The long, cold amber of the afterglow casts clear black lunar shadows. There is an animal mystery in the light that sets upon the fields like a frozen muscle that will flex and wake at sunrise.”

Reviews:

Robert Macfarlane remembers JA Baker’s The Peregrine – a fierce, ecstatic, prophetic account of one man’s obsession that has held readers in its talon-like grip for 50 years Guardian Review

“The ecstasy of observation”: Werner Herzog audio review of The Peregrine

Outside Lies Magic by John Stilgoe

Amongst other things John Stilgoe is a professor of the built American landscape. I studied with him after 20 years practicing as a photographer. Before Stilgoe I had always seen the landscape as a location where drama of some form or another was enacted.

I arrived at Harvard after spending 20 years photographing people at very close proximity. By the mid 2000s, I felt I had become engaged in what I saw as a hierarchical, proscribed and increasingly ignoble form of journalism. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, but I wanted to step off the carousel and change my relationship with the world—and with journalism and the media.

I felt constrained by the orthodoxy of the media and the practice of the craft as I had experienced it. I knew I wanted to remain at large and engaged as a storyteller with the parts of the world I care deeply about, but I wanted to change the process and the outcomes. I couldn’t work within the same constraints. I had no idea what I would find at Harvard and while I sought nothing specific I was hoping to find something that would at least help me begin to reshape what would come next.

There were three courses I took that changed everything. Constance Hale’s narrative writing course at the Nieman Foundation gave me the courage to experiment with the wonder of writing. Anne McGhee’s life drawing class at the Graduate School of Design, courtesy of the Loeb Foundation, helped me leave the violence behind and see without a camera. And perhaps most of all, professor John Stilgoe’s Studies of the Built North American Environment helped me see beauty, significance and nuance in what were hitherto the most unremarkable places. I saw magic in the unspectacular. He helped me re-embrace the possibilities of imagery and visual narratives and look for things I would never have looked for before.

When I left Harvard, I picked up a camera for the first time in a year and went to Arizona and photographed a story on immigration using the built environment—the landscape—as the sole character in the story, an unthinkable idea for me before I met John Stilgoe.

This short book exorts us to step outside and see magic in ordinary places. “Get out now,” he urges us “Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century.”

The landscape is a vast tableau and a principle character in any story, it shapes who we are, it is where life is enacted.

An excerpt from the book:

“Beneath the elevated interstate highway lie the lots to which dented tow trucks tow illegally parked cars, lots filled with piles of sand, great stacks of concrete lane barriers, heaps upon heaps of shattered asphalt and concrete and rusted reinforcing rod surrounded by derelict construction machines. Beneath the elevated highway stand disused construction-site trailers, long-parked trailer-truck trailers, dozens of buses with every window long smashed. Beneath the elevated highway march the four-foot-high piles of dirt and litter emptied in perfect rows from three-wheeled street-sweeping machines, piles awaiting pickup by loaders and dump trucks that seem never to arrive. Everywhere beneath elevated highways blossom makeshift dumps, great clutches of abandoned cars and burned-out cars, the former often occupied as homes by the homeless, the latter serving as unofficial Dumpsters and toilets. Beneath the elevated highway the exploring bicyclist finds the homes never visited by the United States Census, the clusters of cardboard cartons, sheet-metal boxes, construction-timber lean-tos, and automobile hoods that comprise the turn-of-the-millennium American jungle.”

On War: Memoir and individual experience.

Storm of Steel (in German: In Stahlgewittern) by Ernst Jünger

The memoir of German officer Ernst Jünger's experiences on the Western Front during the First World War. I have read many accounts of WWI from a soldiers perspective, and much of the poetry but this book affected me the most because of its rawness and unnerving honesty. Published in 1920 it is one of the first personal accounts to be written and for many, it is the most powerful first person account of war ever published. The book is a graphic and savage account of trench warfare from the perspective of a German officer. 'Storm of Steel' exposes not only the horrors but also the fascination and rapture of war. It was re edited by Junger many times during his long life, the changes often driven by changing attitudes. I recommend reading the original or an early translation.

An excerpt from the book:

“These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Reading this book is like talking to Tim Page. A new language, a language invented in a specific time for a specific place is crafted. No other form of English would have worked for this book. I understood that conventions about what and how things should be observed and reported can be broken, and that reporting (Herr was a journalist for Esquire in Vietnam) can just as easily focus on what seems inconsequential as the great moments in history.

An excerpt from the book:

“Cover the war, what a gig to frame for yourself, going out after one kind of information and getting another, totally other, to lock your eyes open, drop your blood temperature down under the 0, dry your mouth out so a full swig of water disappeared in there before you could swallow, turn your breath fouler than corpse gas. There were times when your fear would take directions so wild that you had to stop and watch the spin. Forget the Cong, the trees would kill you, the elephant grass grew up homicidal, the ground you were walking over possessed malignant intelligence, your whole environment was a bath. Even so, considering where you were and what was happening to so many people, it was a privilege just to be able to feel afraid.

So you learned about fear, it was hard to know what you really learned about courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice? What about those acts that didn’t require courage to perform, but made you a coward if you didn’t? It was hard to know at the moment, easy to make a mistake when it came, like the mistake of thinking that all you needed to perform a witness act were your eyes. A lot of what people called courage was only undifferentiated energy cut loose by the intensity of the moment, mind loss that sent the actor on an incredible run; if he survived it he had the chance later to decide whether he’d really been brave or just overcome with life, even ecstasy. A lot of people found the guts to just call it all off and refuse to ever go out anymore, they turned and submitted to the penalty end of the system or they just split. A lot of reporters, too, I had friends in the press corps who went out once or twice and then never again. Sometimes I thought that they were the sanest, most serious people of all, although to be honest I never said so until my time there was almost over.

“We had this gook and we was gonna skin him” (a grunt told me), “I mean he was already dead and everything, and the lieutenant comes over and says, ‘Hey asshole, there’s a reporter in the TOC, you want him to come out and see that? I mean, use your fucking heads, there’s a time and place for everything.…”

“Too bad you wasn’t with us last week” (another grunt told me, coming off a no-contact operation), “we killed so many gooks it wasn’t even funny.”

Was it possible that they were there and not haunted? No, not possible, not a chance, I know I wasn’t the only one. Where are they now? (Where am I now?) I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet. Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that. But disgust was only one color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors, there wasn’t a color left out. I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn’t squeeze out at least one for these men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them.

But of course we were intimate, I’ll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it.”

**The Sorrow of War (in Vietnamese: Nõi buõn chién tranh) by Bào Ninh.**

Strictly speaking this is a novel, but it draws on the personal experiences of the author who was a soldier fighting for North Vietnam in the American War (also known as the Vietnam War). Ninh joined the ‘Glorious 27th Youth Brigade’, when he was 17 years old. Of the five hundred men who went to war with the brigade in 1969, Ninh is one of only ten who survived.

Many of the books I read about the war in Vietnam were written by French, Americans or other non-Vietnamese. All the movies I saw were made from an American or French perspective, everything else I found in popular culture about that war was written by foreigners. This is the first book I read by a Vietnamese author and it is a heartbreaking, searing, tour de force.

I was always struck by this line in the book: “Each of us carries in his heart a separate war which in many ways was totally different, despite our common cause”. War is often written about by people who don’t experience it, and the assumption is frequently made that every man and woman involved is sharing a similar experience. Superficially they may be, but every experience is uniquely felt.

Excerpted from the book:

“The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a daness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain.”

“To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But for those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox”

Immersion: Observing from within.

A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

This book (and its companion ‘Between the Woods and the Water’) was reported in 1933 and 1935 by an 18 year old upper middle class Englishman with an existentialist problem and the passion and drive to become a writer. It was written and published 42 years later in 1977, by which time Fermor was a highly decorated war veteran and scholar who was regarded by many as the greatest travel writer in the English language. This book conveys the immediacy of young mans observation while walking by foot the length of Europe - from Rotterdam to Istanbul - during the rise of the Nazi’s, and the perspective of the highly cultured and sophisticated author in his 60’s. Fermor made his way through Europe in the company of local people. He slept in public houses, barns and farms and spent his time eating and drinking with local people, observing changing attitudes and the rise of populism and nationalism in Europe. His methodology is as priceless today as it was then.

An excerpt from the book:

“Sleep was creeping on. Gradually Frau Hübner’s face, the parrot’s cage, the lamp, the stuffed furniture and the thousand buttons on the upholstery began to lose their outlines and merge. The rise and fall of her rhetoric and Toni’s heckling would be blotted out for seconds, even minutes. At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever.”

From the New York Review of Books:

At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.

By Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic:

At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion... They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart, besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage...Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he depicts here. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the coming catastrophe.

Factory Man by Beth Macy

Beth Macy and I were Nieman Fellows at Harvard together in 2010. At that time Beth was a reporter for the Roanoke Times, and had spent years working in Virginia writing news and feature stories. Beth was a gifted writer but wanted to work on longer deeper projects than a newspaper could accommodate. The temptation many writers and photographers feel at this point in their careers is to move, to go to New York, London or Paris and work on big national or international stories. Beth chose a different direction, she stayed local.

As she puts it she was an expert at “making friends before you need them, and then collaborating with those people”. Beth is an extraordinary writer who has now written numerous New York Times Best Sellers about massive global stories, but all reported and centered locally, in Virginia (see also Dopesick and Truevine) She draws on years of reporting and immersion in communities where she lives. She writes penetrating and deeply personal stories about people who she is familiar with, people who trust her and people who she obviously cares about.

An excerpt from Factory Man: “The real value in manufacturing is creating a community where cash flows. If the American people only realized what’s taken place, they wouldn’t ever buy anything from Walmart again.”