Project 1 -Exercise 5.1:
The distance between us
Use your camera as a measuring device. This doesn’t refer to the distance scale on the focus ring. Rather, find a subject that you have an empathy with and take a sequence of shots to ‘explore the distance between you’. Add the sequence to your learning log, indicating which is your ‘select’ – your best shot.
When you review the set to decide upon a ‘select’, don’t evaluate the shots just according to the idea you had when you took the photographs; instead evaluate it by what you discover within the frame (you’ve already done this in Exercise 1.4). In other words, be open to the unexpected. In conversation with the author, the photographer Alexia Clorinda expressed this idea in the following way:
Look critically at the work you did by including what you didn’t mean to do. Include the mistake, or your unconscious, or whatever you want to call it, and analyse it not from the point of view of
your intention, but because it is there.
The word 'empathy' can have multiple meanings depending on what you are relating too. In the job that I do, working with children with special needs, 'empathy', to me means understanding, connection and sharing feelings of those individuals.
The school I work in usually hires a professional photographer every year to take photos for the school website and the many hundreds of display frames we have in the school corridors. Due to lockdown, this hasn't been able to happen which made me want to replace some of the photos of the class I am currently working in. This gave me the idea to use one of the pupils as my subject for this exercise.
The pupil you will see in the series of shots below is incredibly photogenic but he is not a child that you could ask to stand and pose for a photo. He has a diagnosis of autism and is pre-verbal.
The brief asks to 'explore the distance between you'. This is an interesting subject as I have a lovely relationship with the pupil in the photos. He trusts me and engages with me but due to his complex needs there will always be some form of distance between us no matter how much I empathise with him.
My intent when taking the photos was to capture the pupil in a natural way at playtime. At times he would let me get close to him but like most children with autism they like their personal space. In the majority of the images the pupil isn't looking at the camera, he is content and enjoying his time outside but every so often he would clock on to the camera.
The point of view of these images from an outsider would be of a young boy outside, in a playground, exploring the space but because of my empathy with the subject, I know he has complex needs, I know that he is regulating his emotions in each shot and that each and every movement he makes includes some kind of sensory exploration.
The image above is my chosen 'select' image. A moment captured of the pupil before he moves into the coloured glass tunnel as he becomes aware of me trying to sneak a photo of him.
There is a big mistake in the frame where you can see my reflection in the red panel of glass. At the time of taking this shot, I wasn't aware that there was a mirror image of me and my camera in the frame. My tutor would call this 'a happy mistake'.
I think this image captures perfectly the distance between us. Me giving the pupil his space to explore but still close enough to capture an engaging photo of him. I could have cropped this image to hide the mistake but feel it has worked in my favour and is quite fitting of the exercise. A photograph in the making always contains at least two subjects - The person taking the photos and the subject being photographed and this shot has captured both of those.
