Roma: lentezza (3c)

As I wrote in the last post, street photography in Roma is challenging. On one side there is plenty of action in the centre, but in this hyper-touristic setting - where everyone virtually is using a camera - it feels harder to do something special. Of course I could have tried to go in the periphery or semi -periphery, but again I felt I would simply have fallen back in the cliché pictures of the “borgate”.

I somehow wanted to try to look at the centre with new eyes.

A blog gave me an interesting idea: I should participate to “Lentezza” (slowness), a collective/social art initiative. The event was aimed at rediscovering the town, pushing participants to look at it outside the touristic paths and with new eyes.

Participants were invited to draw a word linked to the idea of “slowness”on a map of Rome, and then follow the path they traced on the map. The starting point for each path was Piazza dell’Orologio, in a nice orange tree garden which I never had visited before. The arrival point was the Trevi fountain. Each participant was given a kit, comprising post it (to write notes and comments and stick them on the walls along the path), a pencil, a map and some instructions.

Instead of walking I took my bike. This allow me to be honest and ride (slowly!) through the streets composing my path (the word “slow”), but also to explore other alleys, and take some pictures of participants as they were walking by following their paths. In same cases I chatted with them before taking pictures… Other times I followed people, and I discovered that it is possible to follow someone for a long time without been noticed! It was not always easy to spot the other participants as everyone in the centre of Roma seems to hold a map. An additional challenge was that post-it were also very small, and written with pencil, so they were hardly usable in pictures taken with a 24 (equiv 35) mm.

At the end of the walk all participants wrote an “haiku postcard” and left it to a souvenir seller in Piazza di Trevi. Everyone exchanged a few comments about their walk, waiting for 7pm, the moment when we were all supposed to freeze for a few minutes as statues. I froze - of course1 - in a position which could allow me to take pictures of the fellow walkers looking as statues as tourists walked around them.

Roma: walking around

I am getting worried about the street picture project. I love taking street pictures, but now that it has been transformed in a homework I find it very hard! I did not yet came up some interesting themes. Roma of course offers many opportunities, but I feel that so many are borderline with cliché touristy pics… Everyone I meet seems to have a camera. So, how can I shoot something that is more than the witty tourist picture?

I walked along Via Cola di Rienzo, a shopping street. A street musician was playing at a corner. The music was bad, but his outfit great. He was placed in such a way that I could take pics of the people passing in front of him and of their reaction. I stayed a while, took pics with many people or with no one… I used the posts of traffic lights and road signals to fill in the frame, the electoral posters to see if the message could resonate in the picture.. ( “Do not change government. Change Italy” on one side, which is the poster of the new democratic party… and the symbol of “Forza nuova”, an old fascist party on another). Nothing really happened, apart from a grandpa dancing a bit with his little grand daughter in front of him. I missed the action as I was too far.

I walked to Piazza del Popolo, hoping that I could do something with this beautiful large space and the long shadows of sunset. I sat on the wall around it, looking at the tourist relaxing after a long day of walking. I used a 50mm from there, and tried to have some people/action in a corner of the frame but also use the Piazza in the composition, the less obvious parts of it: the walls, the fountains, the stones rather than the domes and the obelisk. I captured a dad feeding his baby with a bottle, shame that the baby face was never visible enough. A child on his bike. A fair share of graffiti, kissing couples, tourists sitting on the ground… but all in all nothing really special.

Back home. I am also catching up with the classes. I finally completed the one about Friedlander, Webb, Harvey and Parke. I did it in instalments, one photographer at the time… adding, for each, some time to look at their work on the internet. I really loved them all. I loved the way they used colours. I loved the visual riddles, the complexity of the frame. It is true, however, that these pictures sometimes "force" people to see, and in doing them they also point to a direction. I had found the pics of Frank bland, but now I also understand that they had a more sattle way to make think and reflect, not so much "in your face"... something that is more open ended rather than as a solution of a puzzle.
Unfortunately I found out that most of their books are sold out or incredibly expensive… It is so good that at least the magnum archive is on line! During the class I thought so many times “I wish I could do a pic like this”. When we will have to work in the style of some masters, well, they will be definitely be in my shortlist.

Amazon (as in "books from")

A whole week of meetingsin Brighton / London. I am exhausted. No time / opportunity to take a single pic. No time even to think. I managed to have the tutorial but the wireless had problems, it was hard to communicate. The photo highlight of the week was to receive some of the books from the course list that I had ordered from Amazon. Amongst them there was Afghanistan Chronotopia by Norfolk, the first I opened. I must confess that I was disappointed, as I discovered that it was a book of wonderful pictures but of the usual cliché Afghanistan. There is something disturbing is this continuous representation of Afghanistan as a war land, as if there was no other possible identity for this country, as if nothing else mattered. I should really find the time to do something with the hundreds (well... thousands really) pics I have of it. Unfortunately quality is not great, they are at 5mp only, and I wish I could go back and take more. But out of them only a handful contain a rocket, a tank, a bullet. The rest is life, as it is, everyday, in this beautiful land, outside of Kabul and off the beaten track.

Back to Roma and 1st attempt at street pics assignement

Back to Roma, and packing to leave tomorrow. I took a few shots on the train from the airport. A beautiful and elegant woman started to course other passengers for petty reasons, and then went into a monologue, louder and louder, in some Slavic language. The only work I could understand was “curva” (prostitute). As she started to intersperse some Italian words to the language, I could picture the uncomfortable talk she probably had at the airport with policemens accusing her to be a bitch. Comments about Italian politics, about a country rotten to the core, also popped in her monologue. Having a street photo assignment to do made me braver than I would usually be in this situation, and I dared a few pics. The seat in front of me ensured a bit of protection, but was also working well to divide the scene in two parts: it provided that boundary that the traveller to the right was desperately seeking. Unfortunately most of the monologue was done with her face towards the windows, apart from occasional and sudden burst of rage directed to the desperate passenger sitting opposite to her.

Exercise 2c: barber shops in Mukono

I really had to be persistent to complete the assignment. Yesterday I visited the barbers I befriended. At first I thought I was lucky. The barber in the small blue stall down the market was cutting the hair of a boy who did not mind pictures . But the cut was nearly done, so I could only take a few pictures (see set 1). I started taking pictures from the door, and the first obvious thing was to try and play with the mirrors. The challenge with mirrors in the minuscule shop was not to be in the picture myself!

At first I mirrored the image of barber and client. Then I tried to cut the barber out, focusing only on his hands, but capturing his reflection in the mirror. I liked experimenting with this because I could then juxtapose different aspects of the interaction in the same picture: on one side the contact of hands and head, on the other the indifference, the distance in the relation. Are barber and client close or are they really in two separate worlds? To work further on this idea, in another picture I cut out the hands of the barber to take the perspective of the boy. The boy could see the barber only in the reflection, but the reflection was not enough to understand what the hands behind his head were doing. The results is a picture of two people that are distant from each other even if they are in close contact.

I wish I had the time experiment with moving to the back of the shop: I would have liked to capture barber and client, a hint of the shop, but also some of the landscape around, other stalls or by-passer, to give more a sense of the place: mighty barber and client in the foreground, as if they were in a big space… but a reality check of what the shop really look like by capturing similar ones in the background. Close to sanset, the light was just right to try to do so, still luminous but not falling directly on the lenses.

But no other client came. The boy paid (picture taken) and left. I had a nice chat with Byaluhang about how he built his stall, the cost of rent of the plot and of the electricity, with a meter shared across 5 shops. Electricity was essential to make lights and razor work, but really unreliable, so one of the dreams of Byaluhang was to get a generator. Another dream was to get a larger mirror, and a tv set for his family. He is working hard for this: in the day he farms at the outskirts of Mukono, in the evening he comes to the shop. His wife popped in with a baby at the back. She was his second wife, the first one was still at the village with three children. As the light went off and no client came I moved away, to visit the barber shop of Peter by the matatu station. No luck there: by the time I talked myself in again, I could jsut do three bad shots in a hurry of a client… (set 2). Again lots of nice chatting, with Peter and his shop neighbours, but no one else came. Dinner time is a dead time, and the barber was basically waiting for the generator to run out of petrol to close. Shop opening time is: from 7 or 8 AM… until that time late evening when the petrol in the generator finishes.

Today I went again to the shop of Peter. No luck again. He was chatting with a friend, but no clients. I was offered to sit on a bench out of the shop. When conversation stalled, I resorted to take a few pictures of Peter and his friend as they were just killing time without talking any longer. (set 3) I did not move from where I was and I tried to experiment with the plastic curtain of the shop. At some point I started pushing the little plastic chains of the curtain to try and capture the face of the friend and the reflection of the barber behind the moving curtain. I removed from the set the shots that were obviously wrong, with the chains hiding their face, but with some luck at the end I got one shot right.

Incidentally, these pictures, as others in the set, show my problems in getting the exposure right when photographing black people, especially when they are wearing / they are surrounded by white. I still did not master the best way to do so. Need exercise and advice on this.

I walked to the little Byaluhang stall, but it was closed! I asked to the barber next door if he was well and coming. He was not really sure, but, surprise surprise, this time – probably hit but my stubbornness at obtaining barber’s pictures - he told me that I could take pictures of him! (set 4) I tried again to play with mirrors a bit, juxtaposing images. I also tried to work out where would it be better to focus: on the real people or on the images in the mirror? I feel that the pics I took focusing on the mirror image could have worked well if I had gone closer / changed the focal length. I also noticed that Patrick, the barber was of a very dark complexion and tall enough to be in the shadow when the light was coming nearly horizontally from outside. Probably I could have used better the challenge of having his head in the dark. Maybe I could have pushed this contrast further, and added a bit of mystery to the picture by making him disappearing in the background?

I then managed to reach the panoramic point of the shop, a chair on the back, and from them I could also put in the picture a client waiting, which was an interesting subject as he was lit by the sun. One image I like has him at the centre, looking outside, oblivious of the action happening in front of him and, replicated ab infinitum on the mirror behind him (not to mention an odd white person hopping on chairs). Bad news is that I focused badly and he is not really 100% sharp. I then moved to the outside of the shop, I composed my pictures placing the door lock in the top left corner, to show the shop outside and I aligned the composition on the main shelf. I liked that angle, but I feel that I got the exposure wrong, just a bit too dark.

I moved further to the outside, to show more of the shop. I wanted to show that this interaction was really happening in a small wooden box, but I could not get the light right, I would either overexpose the door or underexpose the people. I am happy of how in most instances I managed to use the central axis of the door to divide the composition (either separating Patrick and client of their bodies from their reflection). Probably I should have focused more on the left side of the door, which was in shadow and had a texture, and cut out the right.

The only disappointment is that Patrick does not have a postal address so I will not be able to send him a nice copy of his pictures. But I managed at least to print a few pics on paper, I wonder if they will ever make it to the walls of its shop, maybe close to his Saddam Hussain poster!

Exercise 2c: failed attempt

Despite lots of goodwill, lot of chatting but no new pics. Apart from loads of “workshop pictures” (which seems to be a good conversation prop with colleagues about the need of using more pictures in documenting our work. Little by little I will persuade some to try harder on this front. I am on a mission).

Getting my third set is quite a challenge, also considering that – because of endless workshop sessions and work backlog - I can freely roam about the hotel only for a limited time span... (It is actually very good to have some homework that can pull me out of this cocoon!).

At least I came out with an idea for a relationship picture with some local character: relationship between a hair dresser / barber and the clients. I first tried to look for a beauty parlour for women. Sunday evening I asked around, to receptionists and waitresses, if they could take me to a hair dresser they know and who would not mind a few pictures taken. It did not work out: I was told that most women would have their hair made up on the weekend, so basically I missed my chance. They promised they would investigate, but so far no good news. Too bad.

Anyway, barbers seems to be busy all the time, so I went around Mukono town. I started walking around the matatu station near to the hotel, trying to find a barber shop where I could hang around and take pics. No one was enthusiastic, several asked for money, and the few persuadable ones had a long queue of not-at-all-keen clients. I walked around, through the town market. The sun set, the night came, the fast night of the tropics. The fruit vendors lit their oil lamps. I walked along the road, shops become run-down stalls. No pics, no pics, no pics...It was a bit frustrating, but still nice sightseeing: looking at the painted signboards of some shops, the variety of posters in others, the attitude of the clientele. It is possible to do some sightseeing and collect good memories even without shooting pictures, after all. But, ehi!, writers have it certainly easier than photographers when it comes to capture reality!

Finally I found a barber keen to be photographed, but the moment I was ready to start, he finished the haircut!! I hanged around for sometime, chatting in front of the shop with a couple of boys. In vain. No one else came and the barber closed his shop. I shall try to go back tomorrow. On the way back, at the matatu station, one of the barbers that first had refused to have the picture became more chatty, and invited me to the shop. He wanted to know how much I would pay for taking pictures. Well.. nothing of course, but I promised that I would send some printouts… he was not terribly impressed, but I started joking, with him and with the shop keepers around. And from joking we moved on more serious talk. As they asked me “what are you doing here?”, we then started to talk about HIV/AIDS, the need for treatments, the challenges of being positive. The barber now seemed a little more keen to have the picture taken. With a bit of luck tomorrow maybe I can be more successful.

Exercise 2b: facilitator interacting with a STAR group

The second set of pictures was not a very successful one, in terms of producing nice shots, and probably it was not also strictly as per the briefing (i.e. I did not focus on two people, but on a person and a group).

But for me this exercise was an important opportunity to try to tackle work related pictures through different lenses. I participated to a meeting of a community group, using the “STAR” (Societies Tackling AIDS through Rights) approach. The group discusses and takes action on HIV/AIDS and other related issues. The tools used are the - quite standard - “participatory rural appraisal” (PRA) tools.

I have tons of quite conventional pictures of people engaging in PRA, from all over the places,. Picture of people filling in flipcharts or mapping issues on the ground. It is quite a mechanical exercise to me, which I do out of habit.

The exercise helped me to look at the action from a different angle, and to thake pictures not on "autopilot". I chose to focus on the relationship amongst the group facilitator and the group, and the challenges were:

• to capture the “relationship” dimension of our work, looking at how people involved in the exercises relate and interact. It might sound strange, but the relationship dimension - which should be key- is too often forgotten by us, NGO workers, as we engage in mechanical applications of “tools”.
• To shoot a relatively clean and picture amongst the chaos of these processes (plenty of people, interacting dynamically, lots of clutter around…)
• To make the picture interesting even when it involved simply a person going around with flipcharts and providing quick hints to people. This is a challenge that is important to take: much development work revolves around people sitting together and discussing. How can I show that this bonding can really change their attitudes, perceptions, position in society and, ultimately, life?

I do not think I had made any exciting shots, but I felt that the exercise was really useful to push me to transform routine pictures in something which can carry more complex meanings.

Exercise 2a: boys playing

The first two days of the trip to Uganda were the best. We did an “immersion”. This - in ActionAid jargon - means being hosted by a family in a village, living the life of our hosts, to get an insight of what “living in poverty” means. I lived with Veronica, her husband and 10 children.

Lot of chatting: when sitting in front of the house, when walking through the villages, and also in the evening, while the radio was broadcasting the Africa Cup matches.

I also helped her to farm and to fetch water; and I learnt to cook the traditional “matooko”. Unforgettable hospitality. I had also had the opportunity of talking loads of pictures, including a few for the exercises. The first set I took looked at the interactions amongst children in the family playing their favourite game, "draft". The board is drawn on the ground, and coffee beans are used as pawns. It is a game of reflection, it is slow, with few sudden movements to place the beans on the board after some thinking, tryign to align them; and ephemeral expressions of joy or disappointment following a move. It was quite difficult to get the timing right, to capture the full extension of a gesture or the funny expressions of the boys. It was also quite challenging to capture the context so that it could be an non intrusive background.

This picture (as the other ones I will upload) belongs to the third set I have done on the game, with different players. By then the novelty of their guest "musungu" (white person) taking pictures had wore off, and they were oblivious (or pretended to be!) of my presence.

In Uganda

I am in Uganda participating to a large International workshop on our HIV/AIDS work, bringing together staff from ActionAid, from many countries. It is fun to meet so many good colleagues, but all in all I do not like much these big meetings. One ends spending the whole day in a large hotel talking… talking… and talking… and actually experiencing very little of what we are talking about, or about the place we all travelled to…

Athens: quick notes on the tutorial

This week was quite insane, and I dined more often on planes than at a table. But somehow I still managed to have my first individual tutorial, very useful. Out of it came a few areas I want to keep in mind and focus on when taking pictures in the next few days. Well, actually we discussed many points, but there is only so much at a time I can think of in addition to manipulating the controls of the camera!

• framing the picture: more attention to what happens at the edges of the frame, conscious decision on what to put in and out and what to crop. I should learn not to be afraid of cropping elements, if this can add visual energy and interest.
• depth of the picture: need to continuously shift amongst background / foreground when composing the picture, to understand how the background can add interest to the action in the foreground rather than clutter it.
• visual energy: it seems that I am not afraid of tilting the camera to follow the action, maybe it would be worth to working on this more consciously and try to create pictures that have more visual energy (at the same time following better the action to really capture at the peak).

In parallel, of course I should continue to work on the technical side, maybe one variable at the time (focusing choosing for example right exposure / shutter / focal length). I should clean the sensor and consider getting a fixed focal lens (which I never owned in my life), possibly a 20 / 24 (35 mm equivalent). Let's see if there is anything in second hand photo shops...
And I should push myself to do more research on the subject. Which of course is a little bit challenging when constantly on the move. But I felt that this first exercise had already made myself interact more with the subjects that I usually do (from "asking permission for one picture" to "asking permission for a more lengthy picture project"). On a personal side I guess that more research should also be accompanied by self awareness that I am serious about taking pictures, and I should not shy off this.