Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Chapter I: Photojournalism

In the 1980s, I began a photographic project that started as a study of an alcoholism treatment program but eventually came to focus on religion; in particular, on the hierarchy and sexism that characterize American religious institutions. I had worked for years as a newspaper photojournalist in Seattle, where the project was done, and elsewhere. At first, the experience and knowledge I had acquired working on daily newspapers were the chief influences on what I did and the results I got. I thought that the only learning I had to do was about the subject as I then saw it: alcoholism treatment. I took what I knew about photography for granted. It was a hard-won skill I could count on. I knew what a “good” photograph was, and I knew good work when I saw it. It didn’t occur to me then that a big chunk of my field work would be an exploration of how to make photographs that communicated my understanding of what I was studying more fully than those “good” ones could.

But my subject evolved, and so did the kind of photographs I made. They had to change, because, in some fundamental ways, the conventions of newspaper photojournalism hindered the expression and working-through of my ideas about what I was looking at. As I investigated religion, I began to develop ideas that were inappropriate as newspaper stories, although they were perfectly good ideas from the perspective, say, of feminist social science. My professional habits gave me no way to embody those ideas in visual images. In freeing myself from the constraints of newspaper photojournalism, I learned what those constraints had been. They were nothing as simple as an editor telling you you cannot do that. Rather, they were built into your idea of a suitable subject and of the right ways to photograph that subject, the subject and the right ways growing out of what the newspaper needed.

Just as my ideas about photography and my subject evolved during the project, so did my conception of the final form of presentation the project would take. When I started, I didn’t know explicitly what that final form would be, although I knew the project would contain far too many photographs for a conventional newspaper picture story. I thought perhaps it might be some kind of book or, more likely, an exhibit in conjunction with the Seattle Indian Alcoholism Program. There would be text, but it would be information about alcoholism and possibly oral histories of the individuals I photographed.

Any subject is intricately entwined with the form used to tell about it. The form sets the boundaries for the kinds of questions that can be posed and answered. The medium limits or expands the number of possible approaches and styles of presentation. Written text and photographic images are two ways of getting at something, and in the end I used both certainly more text than I had ever imagined I would in a photographic book to get at the things I wanted to talk about.

Doing this project was a process of studying religious groups; of studying photographic conventions and the way they enable (or, conversely, stand in the way of) gaining knowledge and communicating it; and of studying my own personal development as a photographer and investigator of the social world. My subject, in the end, was a braid of all of these processes. Ideas about religion, ideas about picture making, and the narrative of my own experience became impossible to separate. A little background will explain how I learned the professional skills and work habits I brought to the project. Some other things I brought to it were more personal and had to do with my ideas about religion.

“Out of the Darkroom and Into the Newsroom”

I started working for newspapers in the mid-1970s, one of the first generation of college-trained newspaper photographers. Many of the photographers we replaced were men who had learned their craft in the military around the time of World War II; they called themselves “press photographers” or “news photographers.” One way this new generation I was part of emphasized our difference from our predecessors was by taking a new name. We called ourselves “photojournalists.” Sometime during my first week at the Seattle Times in 1977, Kathy Andrisevic, who had been hired there three months earlier, told me to insist that “photojournalist,” rather than “photographer,” be printed on my business card.

The distinction was important, and it was the word “journalist” that was critical. Journalist implied an educated “reporter with a camera,” an equal of the journalists who used words, the writers. It claimed that we were literate, thinking reporters who told stories in pictures and could no longer be treated like “second-class citizens in the newsroom.” We meant to contrast ourselves with the oldtimers, the press photographers, who often were treated like baboons with cameras, as reporters ordered them around and told them what to photograph. Stereotypical “press photographers,” as opposed to “photojournalists,” were uncouth, socially insensitive eccentrics. They were often considered “characters.” They made posed pictures of corporate executives giving checks to directors of charities (contemptuously called “check passings”) or holding shovels at groundbreakings. They photographed spot news: accidents, fires, and crime. When a house burned, they were on the spot with their big flash and a pushy attitude. Kathy Andrisevic told an apocryphal story about how that kind of news photographer worked: A photographer from a New York paper sees an accident, rolls down the car window, and yells, “Any dead?” When someone says, “No, no one died,” he rolls the window up and drives away.

Newspaper photojournalists, on the other hand, were concerned about the professionalization of news photography. “Professionalization” was code for gaining autonomy at work and the respect of fellow workers. Our battlecry was, “Out of the darkroom and into the newsroom.”1 We believed that photographers had to get control of the assigning, editing, and displaying of photographs in the newspaper if we were ever going to be anything more than second-class citizens. To do all these things, we had to spend less time in the darkroom and make ourselves a presence in the newsroom. We had to educate editors and reporters about photographs: what made a good assignment and how photographs should be used in the newspaper.

It was social mobility, pure and simple, but not for individuals. It was the collective mobility of the occupation we strove for. We were demanding greater status in the newsroom as a group. We wanted to be recognized as the intellectual and creative equals of writers, not their dumb appendages.2 Few things exasperated Kathy Andrisevic more than hearing reporters use the phrase “my photographer,” which implied that we were inferior to them. We said, “I’m not your photographer!” whenever reporters said that on an assignment. We discussed when and how to complain. Should we object in front of “the subject”? Or was it more professional to talk to the reporter later?

We had been trained to gather information, check names, and figure out what the story was, just like word people, as we called them and they called themselves. (The newspaper world was divided into word people and picture people.) We prided ourselves on being able to generate our own story ideas, write copy and captions, and design layouts all jobs that had routinely been done by word people but were now considered an important part of a photojournalist’s education. We believed that we had to be able to hold our own with the word people, on their terms, in order to gain their respect.

At that time, the job of Assistant Managing Editor of Graphics someone who supervises photographic work and graphic art on the newspaper and is expert in visual materials didn’t exist on most newspapers. It does now. Most photographs were edited, sized, and cropped by word people who had no training in “visuals.” Although they were often called “photo editors,” most of them were copy editors who later made a specialty of handling the photographic assignments and editing. The highest rank a staff photographer could expect to achieve was Chief Photographer.

The editor of the feature section at the Seattle Times, when I worked there in the seventies, was notorious for cropping photographs into circles, pentagons and, on Valentine’s Day, hearts, or insetting them in other photographs. This was anathema to us. We were purists no goofy shapes and no insets.

The Missouri Crusade and the Struggle for Autonomy

This striving for professional status had its origins, in part, for those of us who photographed for daily newspapers, at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, which then had the best-known photojournalism program in the country. Its graduates got good jobs and were respected. The faculty at Missouri were among the chief proponents of this new, elevated view of newspaper photography. The influence of the school spread beyond the people who had studied there.

I learned about the Missouri orientation during the year Kathy Andrisevic and I shared a small darkroom at the Seattle Times. It later became more common for newspapers to have large, communal darkrooms that all staff photographers shared to do their printing, but in the late seventies at the Times photographers had their own darkrooms. There weren’t enough rooms to go around, so someone I never knew who decided to put the two women together. (Kathy was two years older than I, a more experienced photographer, and a graduate of a better journalism school, the University of Missouri. I got my degree at San Jose State.) We scrubbed our darkroom, removing the dried, caked fixer on the sink and the cupboards. We tossed out the old film canisters and mangled strips of negatives piled everywhere by the previous occupant. Kathy set her own Leitz enlarger (it only printed from 35mm negatives, which has a significance I’ll explain later) on the newly cleaned counter. Along the wall near the Leitz, Kathy kept her copy of Visual Impact in Print, by Gerald D. Hurley and Angus McDougall.3 McDougall had been Kathy’s teacher at Missouri.

This book had a great influence on my generation of newspaper photojournalists. It outlined a program for changing the kinds of photographs editors assigned and the way those photographs were eventually displayed in the paper. The book addressed itself to editors and designers as much as to photographers. It outlined a new aesthetic, different from the one the oldtimers used to photograph car wrecks and ribbon cuttings. Significantly, it also outlined a program for changing the status of newspaper photographers.

The book advises that photographs be cropped to be “lean and meaningful,” “trimmed to [their] essentials” so that their “content” can be “quickly grasped” by readers. It advises deleting “distracting elements” (what working photographers often refer to as “clutter”), “correcting” camera tilt, and “reducing the apparent distance between the camera and the subject.” The authors commend and show examples of work in which there is “no posing” and “no camera consciousness” on the part of the subject. If a photograph is posed, then “credibility suffers,” while unposed photographs have “believability.” They praise photographers for making pictures with “eye-catching quality” and for going “behind the scenes.” They tell photographers that “the best photojournalists” are “blessed with good taste, unhandicapped by eccentric behavior or attire,” and, in their dealings with subjects when on assignment, they “quietly establish rapport.”

Editors are told they “must graduate from single-picture thinking,” that “editor and photographer together must plan assignments,” photographers “must have time to probe,” and “pictures must be edited for variety and impact.” In a chapter titled “The Editor,” the authors write that “the mating of pictures and words the right words locking step with the right pictures is what good photojournalism is all about. If the marriage is to work, neither should be subordinate to the other.” Designers are chastised for layouts in which “pictures are used not as pictures but as decorative elements” and told that “the best picture-handlers are purists.” They are commended for layouts in which “size is wisely reserved for pictures stronger in emotional impact,” “words and pictures are closely integrated and always in careful balance,” and “meaning [is] clear enough to be grasped at a glance.”

The struggle for professional autonomy and respectability continued for at least twenty years. In 1990, John Long, president of the National Press Photographers Association, expressed the same concerns in a column in the Association’s official magazine:

We also must remember that photographers are still second-class citizens in the newsroom. The newspaper and television news operations quite simply belong to the word people, so if we are to work on their turf and gain their respect, we have to speak their language. We can be experts in our own field, but if we cannot converse with reporters and editors on their level, we look illiterate. Reporters do not have to know about photography, but we have to know about the things that are important in their world. It is not fair, but no one ever said life was fair. We have to be better just to stay even . . . .

I do not want to sound like a broken record, but you have to dress according to the nature of your assignment. Shorts at funerals are an insult to the people you are photographing and to our entire profession. But this point has been made before and some people just do not want to listen. . . .

It is a simple thing, but at least read your own paper or watch your own newscast.4

Part of the burden of being a newspaper photojournalist was the expectation that you went out and got newspapers to change their ways. Papers like the Seattle Times were considered difficult to change. They had larger and more rigid organizational structures than smaller papers and, in particular, a fragmentation of jobs enforced by the rules of the Newspaper Guild. Writers weren’t allowed to make photographs for the paper (unless they were on an assignment a few hundred miles away from the office); more important to us, photographers weren’t allowed to write or lay out stories. On a smaller paper, where jobs weren’t so narrowly defined, a photographer could write copy, design layouts, and even, at some newspapers, do pasteup. A photographer could have more control over all the steps in the process: the kinds of stories photographed, their selection, cropping, and sizing, and the placement of the photographs on the newspaper page in relation to the text and the headlines. In addition, smaller papers usually had more space available for displaying photographs, an important consideration when you’re making picture stories that contain several photographs.

For these and other reasons, many of us deliberately sought out jobs on small newspapers. Our thinking was that, in order to change things, we had to start at the bottom and work up. Before Kathy Andrisevic came to work at the Seattle Times, she and Rich Shulman, another graduate of the University of Missouri photojournalism program, spent nearly two years at a newspaper in Coffeyville, Kansas. Rich won the award for Newspaper Picture Editor in the Pictures of the Year contest (a prestigious contest in the newspaper business) both years he was in Coffeyville. When photographers from smaller papers started winning these contests, people at the big papers began to notice what was going on.

The Switch to 35mm and Its Consequences

We modeled our work on that of photographers for such magazines as Life and Look, who had been calling themselves photojournalists for decades.5 They often used small-format cameras that made 35mm negatives, while the old school newspaper photographers we were replacing were still using the Speed Graflex with its flash bulbs and 4x5 negatives. Unlike newspaper photographers, they did not photograph three or four assignments a day. They worked for longer periods of time on one story. Their end product was a multiple-picture story, not a single picture. Our ideal assignment at the paper, the kind we hoped for but rarely got, was one that resulted in a picture story consisting of multiple photographs spread over many pages.

The change from the 4x5 Graflex the kind of camera you see newspaper photographers using in old movies to the 35mm on daily newspapers happened in the late sixties and had important implications for how newspaper photographers worked. Since 4x5 film holders held only two sheets of film, each photograph had to be acceptable. Every exposure mattered. If you missed “the shot,” you might not have time to reload before what you wanted or needed was gone. So it’s not surprising that photographers, if they could, controlled the situation in which they were shooting by posing people and setting things up. Not only did a Graflex film holder have to be turned around in order to use its second sheet, but the flash bulbs had to be changed for each exposure, more time-consuming work that further constrained the kind of picture that could be made.

In contrast, a 35mm camera, such as a Leica or Nikon, used roll film that gave you thirty-six exposures, one after the other. You could take more chances, since you didn’t have as much invested in each frame. The camera was lighter and smaller, so you could follow people as they went about their routine activities and get photographs that were more “candid,” that appeared natural and unposed, as if the photographer was not present but was a “fly on the wall.”

Gary Settle, the photo coach at the Seattle Times in the early 1990s (a position unheard of in the 1970s), says that when many of the oldtimers were finally forced to use 35mm cameras and film, they would put their big flash on a Nikon, just as they had with the Graflex, and complain, “Whadda ya mean, this camera isn’t any lighter, it weighs as much as the Graflex, and the pictures are grainy.” Some of them never adapted to the different way of photographing made possible by 35mm cameras. They made the same kinds of photographs they had always made, despite the possibilities the new equipment opened up.

Gary had been a photographer at the Chicago Daily News in 1966 when that newspaper switched to 35mm, but he felt luckier than the other staff photographers because he had already made the switch in 1958 when he was at the Topeka Capital-Journal, one of the first newspapers in the country to make the change. Before Topeka, he had been using a Rollei 2 1/4 (a negative size between the 4x5 and the 35mm), but still found the switch to a 35mm camera difficult. More experienced 35mm users made better pictures with it than he did, and that seemed paradoxical to him. The larger format was considered technically superior because it produced larger negatives from which you could make prints with finer grain and detail. The 35mm cameras were lighter and easier to use in some ways, but to get good negatives from the smaller format you had to be a more exacting technician when the photograph was made.

I learned photography with a 35mm camera. It was the only camera I used, the only one I wanted to use. The photographs I admired in the picture magazines and believed (not always correctly, as I learned years later) to be candid scenes of real life were often made using available light rather than a flash. The subject matter that turned my generation on was what we saw as socially relevant, visual in that it produced eye-catching and emotional photographs, like the best picture stories in Life, made by such photographers as W. Eugene Smith.

The magazine photojournalists we admired were “concerned photographers,”6 which implied that they had a particular kind of subject matter as well as a particular stance toward it. They “cared” about their subjects and looked for the “humanizing element,” the behind-the-scenes struggle and suffering, the victims of the world. Their stories were “uplifting,” revealing the toughness of human nature and the ability of people to overcome adversity, to live in spite of tragedy. Some of the work I admired, as I look back, seems sentimental and cliched.

We thought that what photographs did best was to “capture” emotion, and we wanted to make pictures that caused a strong emotional response in viewers. Our ideal assignments, stories with good “visual potential,” generated such pictures. That was why we thought it important to “personalize” a situation. We saw people as the embodiment of some general condition or problem. Personalizing the problem generated emotion. We photographed someone in a wheelchair, intending that one person to represent everybody in a wheelchair. Such pictures had impact.

Even though this was a “new” way of doing newspaper photography, it was as conventionalized as what it replaced. It was meant (as was the older system) to solve the working problems of the newspaper photographer.7 A daily newspaper ties the making of images to the daily production process: so many pictures a day to illustrate the stories already decided on as that day’s news. The main problem I had to solve in making these photographs was created by that process: how, in a very limited amount of time, to make photographs that illustrated newspaper stories and would be accepted by editors who wanted immediately understandable pictures whose impact would entice people to read the text. I learned, like every competent newspaper photojournalist, to solve the problem by choosing from a repertoire of standard types of pictures that used a limited number of visual components and compositional devices. Making any particular picture was only a matter of adapting the standard format to the specifics of that situation and trying to get an original twist on the standard image.

Standard ways of composing a photograph (organizing its graphic elements in the frame) enhanced its impact. I learned to use a telephoto lens to isolate the subject by making the background out of focus. (The term we used was to make the subject “pop.”) I learned to use a wide-angle lens to place the subject in extreme foreground, so that it appeared much larger than elements in the background. These techniques contributed to making photographs whose message was readily apparent. Standard images illustrated the equally standardized stories I was called on to photograph. When an editor asks for a sports photograph that “says losing,” experienced photographers know what kinds of gestures and compositions “say” losing and where these combinations are likely to occur at a sporting event. The categories of winning and losing and the analysis (that this is the most significant theme) have already been determined. The language, the form, the ideas are already set and are applied to all situations.

Consider the hug. A picture of two people hugging is generally useful as a sign of emotion, an ideogram for sorrow or happiness, depending on the context. When you are assigned to a funeral, for example, you know that everyone back at the paper will be pleased if you make a photograph of people hugging at the side of the coffin. If you show the coffin, the picture is immediately readable as “funeral.” This makes it a good “story-telling picture.” The coffin, a strong visual element, sits where people will parade by it. Eventually, two of them will hug next to it. The hug obvious visual shorthand for the emotion is bound to happen. All you have to do is get the coffin and the hug together in the frame without any distracting background. The more successfully you do this, the greater the photograph’s impact. This picture “works” for every funeral you will ever have to cover.

Photographers, then, as a matter of efficiency, shoot from an implicit script, using standard forms to say standard things about standard topics. The script is derived from professional practices and conventions that define appropriate subjects and standards of good work. Eventually, these skills, and the physical movements required to accomplish them, became embodied knowledge, things my body knew how to do without conscious direction. Internalized, they seemed natural, intuitive, instinctive. My body knew where to stand, how to hold the camera, when to make the exposures.8

Religion

I didn’t intend to study religion when I began photographing an alcoholism treatment program for Native Americans. I went on to photograph at missions and shelters for the homeless because many of the people in the alcoholism program had lived on the streets and frequented these places before entering treatment. I knew nothing about the activities of the missions and shelters or the extensive networks connecting them to organized religion. The link between the two worlds, as I later learned, was more than an arrangement for financial support; many church members regularly went to the missions to serve meals and testify at the gospel services. These things became apparent only when I learned how the missions and shelters operated. Later still, I learned how these groups differed among themselves in how they assigned blame for and assessed the causes of the “problems” they saw in the missions and how they decided what had to be done to fix things. In large part, I became interested in religion because I couldn’t avoid it. One way or another, it dominated the lives of most of the street people. I had had an uneventful and conventional Catholic religious upbringing, which didn’t take. I stopped going to church when I was about seventeen. Although I didn’t go to Catholic schools when I was a child, I did go to Saturday morning catechism. I had none of the unpleasant or traumatic experiences described by some of my generation (I was born in 1950) who did go to Catholic schools. Religion was not important in my adult life.

However, religion is important to the mission system. It is the source of contradictions built into every aspect of that system. If you think of religion as a great moral force, as many people do, you are immediately confronted with those contradictions. Within the mission system religion could work in a very unkind way. You could see religion’s power and the way some people used it to exert control over others. One group of people mission workers and church volunteers supplied or denied food and shelter to another group street people and alcoholics who needed it. The street people and alcoholics got what they needed only if they did things the mission people required of them, things they often didn’t want to do.

As I learned how the missions worked, I began to look at religion as a method of control. Later, I looked for how religion was used as a method of control in more subtle instances, in which the power ratio wasn’t so lopsided. Social power isn’t hidden in the missions as it is in middle-class churches; the power of the church isn’t as diluted or disguised as it is in other areas of life. In the mission world, it’s not spiritual food the church provides, it’s the real thing, and that makes the exertion of control more obvious. The mission workers and volunteers sometimes refer to the spiritual, metaphorically, as food for the soul. But it’s not a lack of spiritual food that is bothering the people who come to the missions; it’s the physical sustenance of life that’s on their minds. The spiritual isn’t as potent a controlling device as real food, and it’s the real food the missions use that brings in the street people and persuades them to participate in the missions’ spiritual activities.

At Thunderbird House, the treatment center for Native American alcoholics, I photographed the Sacred Circle. Once a week the counselors and clients who attended would pass the burning sage and the eagle feather. The ceremony was based on what they knew of an older, naturalistic Indian belief, salvaged from the time before the Christian missionaries arrived. I photographed at Thunderbird for a couple of years before doing the work in this book. Religious beliefs and practices were always around there, but on the periphery. At most of the missions they were front and center, and I noticed the difference.

What began as a photographic study of alcoholism and Native Americans became a study of religion and hierarchy. What began as an exercise in conventional photojournalism became an exploration of new ways of visually representing my understanding of social life. What follows is the story of those transformations.

NOTES

1. John Long attributes this phrase to Rich Clarkson in “Knowledge: Key to Power in the Newsroom,” News Photographer 45 (May 1991): 13.

2. Everett C. Hughes, “Studying the Nurse’s Work” and “Psychology: Science and/or Profession,” Sociological Eye (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1984), 311–15, 360–63.

3. Gerald D. Hurley and Angus McDougall, Visual Impact in Print (Chicago: Visual Impact, 1976).

4. Long, “Knowledge,” 12–13.

5. Karin E. Becker, “Forming a Profession: Ethical Implications of Photojournalistic Practice on German Picture Magazines, 1926–1933,” Studies in Visual Communication 11 (Spring 1985): 45–60.

6. The Concerned Photographer, ed. Cornell Capa (New York: Grossman, 1968).

7. The conventions of visual imagery that I learned as a journalist are described in Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978); Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News (New York: Vintage, 1980); and Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester, “News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 101-12. I have discussed the conventions specific to one genre of news photograph in “The Joy of Victory, the Agony of Defeat: Stereotypes in Newspaper Sports Feature Photographs,” Visual Sociology 8 (Fall 1993): 48-66. The arguments made there apply to photojournalistic practice generally.

8. David Sudnow describes similarly embodied learning in his Ways of the Hand (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), which deals with the way he learned to play jazz piano.