Video Transcript (Video is 7:45)
Good afternoon, I’m Charter Weeks and I apologize for being here virtually in December. I made an arrangement to photograph an annual event in Tennessee, not realizing at the time that it was a conflict with this particular weekend. Mim Fawcett’s (Attleboro Arts Museum) been very generous in allowing me to do this workaround and so I appreciate that.
I’m sorry for not being present in person, but I will expect to see you at the opening at the artist statement the following week. My life as a photographer began in the 1960s as a student and I had the good fortune to study with Harry Callahan at RISD, so I had a really solid grounding in all the technical aspects, of course. The 1960s were a very interesting and vibrant time in the life of photography.
The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War produced extraordinary images of social unrest and became the icon for young photographers who are particularly interested in documentary or editorial photography. Photography really, I think, made a significant change in the perception of the art community. When Robert Frank’s work, The Americans, first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art and in the same year, Edward Steichen’s collection, The Family of Man, had a great influence on people’s vision of photography as a communications tool.
Also around that time, there was a reissue of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was a book by James Agee and Walker Evans documenting the poverty in Appalachia. So all those influences were extremely important during that period of time and they influenced me greatly. Mim said she’d like us to talk for a minute or so about our own work.
I’ve been working primarily as a documentary photographer for most of my adult life and over the last 10 or 15 years have done probably more work than I had done at any previous time in focused ways. About, I guess it must be four years ago now, I was invited along with four other photographers to go to Ghana to sort of document the 50th anniversary of their independence. The original documentation of Ghana was by Paul Strand and he was there for six months at the invitation of Nkrumah and so we went back to sort of do another portrait of Ghana.
It was quite an interesting and vibrant experience for me. This is one of the images that’ll be in the show and was an example of one of the kinds of issues that one has to address when you’re photographing in environments that you’re really unfamiliar with. These people were in a junkyard and we, myself and a young man who was sort of a guide for me, spent almost a half a day in this junkyard and these people are, the idea of approaching a person or a group of people who you don’t know and have no idea what the environment really is or what the, whether or not it’s a hostile environment is a quite an interesting problem.
I used to assign my students when I was a teacher to photograph somebody who they were afraid of and I’ve tried to use that as my own guide in many ways to really approach people irrespective of what the circumstance is. Obviously, you have to use some caution. There’s some situations where you just simply can’t do it but this kind of picture has, in my opinion, it’s fairly aggressive and so it lets people see a kind of emotion of people in another culture in another place and that’s something that I always try to do.
I had an experience just before I went to Ghana. I was in China for about three weeks and when I returned, I found the images quite disappointing because I realized that I hadn’t been aggressive enough. I hadn’t gotten close enough and it’s because I didn’t understand the culture and I didn’t understand what the proper spatial relationship should be between people and so I made a vow to myself that I wouldn’t make that mistake again and I think that this is an example of what came afterwards, to be able to just simply go up and confront people with your camera and so I thought that was a rather successful transition.
Another example where you don’t think that there’s any particular danger or hostility and yet still being able to go to sort of approach a subject very aggressively. This kid was in New York City. Obviously, he’s a kid.
There’s no danger involved but the look on his face, you can see he’s being very direct and I find this an interesting picture among other things because the light that comes across the side of the building is almost a reinforcement of the little sword thing that he has here and so that’s another example of being fairly aggressive when you approach a subject matter. Really, for people like myself, there’s been this whole history of American or not necessarily American photographers but really extraordinary photographers and I’ll just grab my list here. Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Burke White, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Bruce Davidson, who was in fact retained by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, in the 1960s to record the Civil Rights Movement and his images are just incredible.
Tyler Hicks from the New York Times, you may see his work from time to time. Another unbelievably good photographer. So that’s sort of been my training approach and involvement in American photography and I always like to say that photography has the ability to keep yesterday safe for tomorrow.
The idea that we can document things and have them be present for the future and influence the future for people to know what really happened in a particular period of time is to me a very exciting kind of thing. When we think about the Great Depression, you know, what do we think? We think of Margaret Burke White’s picture of the Okies. We think about Dorothea Lange, that woman sitting there with the kid in the middle of Oklahoma somewhere.
We think about those kinds of images of bread lines and whatnot and they tell us much more about that whole period of time than nearly anything else can. So again, I’m very interested in trying to document what’s happening today and hopefully sometime in the future it will be useful. Anyway, thanks so much.
I look forward to seeing you at the opening and I appreciate your indulgence in this matter. Thanks.