Photographing an interview

Lisa Popova. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 2019. For JDC

Conducting an interview and taking pictures at the same time may sound overwhelming but this is a usual practice in social documentary photography. After 8 years of talking while shooting, I now feel as if something is missing when I silently click a shutter button or interview someone without a camera in my hands. However, this type of work is full of challenges and pitfalls. Here is how I navigate this territory.

Ice-breaking

Every interview is a journey, a story in its own right. It has a beginning, a climax, and a resolution. Acting in accordance with the arc of this story is key. Things inevitably go wrong when people try to bend the rules by forcing an interviewee headfirst into the depth of traumatic memories, screwing up the emotional peak or cutting short the ending.

Yakov Bronstein. Almaty, Kazakhstan. 2014. For JDC

Even with the best intents in mind, even being wholeheartedly welcomed, I nevertheless break into someone’s private life when I enter a home as an interviewer with a camera. Usually I only have 40-50 minutes for a home visit, and I come in as a total stranger! By the moment an interview starts, we should trust each other, we can’t be strangers anymore.

How to build trust in such a limited time? First off, regardless of introductions provided by anyone who accompanies me, I always introduce myself again. I announce clearly who I am, what I am going to do, with what purpose, and for whom. Often I tell something about myself. Not the whole life story, but some details that will make me relatable, that have some points of intersection with the interviewee. For example, I can point out that I had the same wallpaper pattern in my living room when I was a kid or that my uncle worked in this town years ago.

I try to dive naturally into an interview by blending it with the initial small talk. I start chatting about simple matters like weather or the photographs on the walls, I never announce formally that we’re starting the interview, just the questions and answers get deeper and deeper as the conversation goes.

For a while, I’m not taking any pictures. I let the camera sit on my lap as we talk. Even when I start snapping, in the beginning, it’s only for a person to get used to the awkward sound and look of the camera. While we’re passing the shallow water of the story, there’s nothing to capture there anyway.

Eye contact

Needless to say, eye contact is probably the most important ingredient of a sincere conversation. That’s the main tool for moderating the conversation, as well. Intensive eye contact confirms that whatever is being told is very important for me to hear. If I notice that the story is drifting away, I can easily show it without saying anything, just by moving my eyes away.

However, taking pictures requires breaking this eye contact, often at those very moments when it needs to be the tightest. Every time I bring the camera to my face I feel this inner pushback as if I’m doing something completely wrong.

Here is what’s important to remember in this regard: not every day people get asked about their life experience. In fact, it’s an extremely rare occasion. What usually happens when we are exploring our past? We’re reliving the distant events and disconnect from the current moment.

It’s only the interviewer who should be present in the moment. The interviewee is out there, on their own journey. If I did everything right, by the moment when we get to the peak of the interview, the person just doesn’t notice my camera anymore, it becomes invisible, non-existent. That’s the moment when I turn into a proverbial fly on the wall.

Galina Lev. St. Petersburg, Russia. 2017. For JDC

I always try to start taking pictures only when we’re deep enough into the conversation, and when I see that the gaze has changed, signaling me that the person doesn’t mind being photographed. That’s a gaze of someone who is not posing for a camera, who keeps being herself. If I grip a camera and nothing changes in the posture, intonations and facial expression of the interviewee, then I’m good to start photographing.

What to ask

An interview is always about the answers, not the questions. Of course, I prepare for each interview. I learn as much as I can beforehand about the biography and family situation, about the hardships and challenges. I write down a list of questions but I never pull it out. Arguably more important is how to ask than what to ask. It’s critical to go with the conversation and ask follow-up questions. Once I show that I’m interested in the story, once I’m curious enough about the details, the conversation flows without much effort.

I like to begin with quantitative questions and end with emotional ones. I can ask “how many years do you live in this house?” to put a person at ease, and end up asking “what do you feel when you wake up in this house?”, when I find it appropriate.

Variety of shots

I can’t bring back from a home visit just a couple of similar frames. I’m supposed to get a variety of shots: middle, wide, details. How to get them when I’m only sitting and conducting an interview?

One of the most efficient ways that I’ve discovered is to wrap up the sitting part and ask for a “tour” around the house. Most often people would say - of course, go ahead and take pictures wherever you want. I would reply - please be so kind to be my guide. I want the host in the frame, not the kitchen. I use this “tour” as an excuse to make shots in a variety of lighting situations, with a variety of backgrounds, but I don’t point it out because I don’t want them to think for a second that they are supposed to pose for me.

Luisa Kalenova. Rostov, Russia. 2019. For JDC

Of course, we keep talking during the “tour”, and quite often as we walk we get to some extremely important details of the life story which a person didn’t find appropriate to reveal while sitting.

Another way to get a variety of shots and at the same time to level up the interview is to ask about the most meaningful object or a photograph in the house. That’s what gets people to talk about their collection of cacti or their only photograph of the late dad, or the family library. These precious objects serve as a starting point for the most intimate stories.

Zulun Issakharov with a portrait of his late father. Dushanbe, Tajikistan. 2014.

Ethics

There is a very delicate balance between getting a vivid story filled with emotions and bringing people to a breakdown by asking them about their traumatic past. I never know which question will trigger a breakdown. Nobody can know. If by any chance I get there, that’s a red flag for me. I find it inappropriate to exploit this condition. I stop taking pictures and try to fix the situation. I must put a person at ease in order to continue. At this moment I’m not an interviewer, I’m someone who can listen with compassion and bring comfort. As a famous documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said: “You ought to conduct an interview as if you’re going to bump into them again after the film is out”.

I deal with the memories, and I should be very careful about bringing them to light. Sometimes an interview reminds a therapy session, but I keep in mind that this therapy is unsought. The interview will be over, I’ll go on with my own life, and the person, in many cases absolutely lonely, will stay one on one with the memories.

It’s always a huge honor for me to feel the trust of someone telling painful things about themselves. When at the end of an interview I thank them, I do so in the most sincere way.

Technical aspects

Camera

Photographing an interview puts some constraints on the way a photographer deals with the equipment. I use the first 5 minutes of small talk to make all the camera adjustments. I can afford to preview the pictures on the camera screen only before we get into a serious conversation. Even then, I just check briefly the histogram to make sure it’s not completely off. I have an automatic preview turned off on my camera, so the images don’t pop up on the screen on their own and don’t distract me. I make my eye focus on the composition and my mind on the conversation. I build a picture in my head before grabbing the camera, and only then I quickly snap it. The less time I spend looking through a viewfinder the better for the rhythm and flow of the interview.

Lens

Very often I have to deal with the dark and dull light of Soviet apartments. For these situations I used to carry around two camera bodies with speedy prime lenses: Nikon D750 with 50/1.4 and Nikon D700 with 20/2.8. Nowadays I’m using an amazing Nikkon 24-70/2.8 lens with my D750. It’s bulky but it’s still more convenient than having two bodies hanging on me.

Notes

I don’t rely on my memory to remember all the stories I capture — sometimes I hear a dozen of them in one day. I use my phone to record sound throughout the interview. I don’t use these recordings for anything but writing my notes. I make a quick note after every single visit, on my way to the next one. Usually, I put down just a few keywords which will then remind me what to look for in the recording. I tried all kinds of ways to save these notes, from a paper notebook to Evernote app. Paper notes were hard to use while riding in the car on the bumpy roads. Evernote was a bit too complicated. I ended up using Google Keep for these quick notes.

Backup

Upon getting back to a hotel the first thing I do is make copies of all the files of the day, including the audio files. I copy them to the laptop and to the external hard drive. Additionally, I make Dropbox do its job of uploading all of it to the cloud. Normally I don’t consider myself a backup freak, but things change when I’m on an assignment in the opposite corner of the world.

Ninel Nikolaeva. Almaty, Kazakhstan. For JDC

Clearing mind

Once the files are saved in multiple places, I lay down on the floor and rest for a while in a “dead body pose”. This is a necessary part of my work — a silent meditation that allows me to internalize all the stories I’ve heard and at the same time to separate myself from them. Without this separation a quick burnout is inevitable.

250 documentary photography assignments. Lessons learned

In 2019 I hit a milestone in my photographer's career: I've accomplished 250 paid documentary assignments. It took me ten years and half a million frames to get there. I thought it's a decent reason to reflect a little bit on what has been done and what the journey feels like.

A-Ha moment

One day I was on an assignment together with a seasoned fundraiser who uses my pictures in the fundraising campaigns for many years . One phrase she said became the most important insight of all my career: "Do you know that some of your images brought in up to million dollars in donations?" This knowledge struck me. For me, this became a justification of all my breakdowns, doubts, fears, struggles and sleepless nights after emotional shoots. When I decided to become a humanitarian photographer, I wanted my pictures to make a difference for real people, and it turns out, they do.

After a few initial years in "pure" photojournalism at the dawn of my life in photography, I realized that no matter how striking a story published in a regular newspaper or magazine is, it serves an informing or entertaining goal, but almost never becomes a call to action. It's the opposite of humanitarian organizations' media: all their publications are aimed to make people want to do something about the cause. This makes a whole lot of sense for me.

What is the most joyful part?

Being a documentary photographer I don't stage things, so I love when a scene surprises me with natural emotions, colors, lines, spots, rhymes and rhythms. A lot of my photoshoots take place in small and dark flats of the former Soviet Union, where you don't expect any visual surprises. Even in that environment a daily life sometimes gains the potential to be perfectly framed, and a rectangle in front of my viewfinder obtains multiple meanings, multiple layers. When I see this happening, I get high. Probably my heart starts racing.

What's the hardest?

There's a lot of bitterness in being a humanitarian photographer. The hardest photoshoot I ever had so far was in war-torn Ukraine. I saw bombed residential buildings in Mariupol, which is my dad's hometown by the way, I spoke to dozens of uprooted and desperate people, I saw a hospital near Slavyansk caught in a cross-fire with staff and patients inside. I remember taking pictures of this ruined hospital and whispering to myself: "Thank goodness I have a camera, so I can concentrate on composition and exposure..."

Walking into someone's house, seeing terrible living conditions and then leaving is hard. I always think: "I spent there an hour and I'm so depressed, and these people spend there every day of their life!"

Listening to the parents of disabled children is hard, to the level that I consider having healthy children a miracle. I'm scared to have more children now and I have a hard time trying to explain my fear to my wife.

Finding out about passing away those whom I recently photographed is hard.

Running into the stories of social injustice, indifference, neglect is hard.

Sometimes, after a day of a shoot, I feel too lucky, undeservingly lucky.

I always get home heartbroken, nevertheless I always head to each assignment inspired and excited. I know that I'm doing a meaningful job, this lets me stay on top of my breakdowns.

What are the pitfalls?

I think my personal pitfall is my willingness to lift too much weight: when I make stills, film video, conduct an interview and translate it in real-time I often feel overwhelmed. I can't afford failure at any of my tasks, so I allocate all my abilities to make everything done, and then by the evening I reach a hotel like a walking dead.

Pieces of advice

I have set a number of strict rules for myself years ago which up to now were never written down. A lot of them are pretty far from the business of photography itself, but following them saved me more than once as a photographer, business person and human being:

• Prior to the shoot get into the mindset of making the best job you've ever done;

• Dignity is the key. It's often being said that no frame deserves a photographer's life. For me the same goes for dignity: no frame deserves humbling your subject. In humanitarian photography, we constantly deal with vulnerable people living through their hardest times. You don't want to exploit them and their condition. Even though you know that their tears in the frame will raise money for them.

On one of my first humanitarian photography assignments, I was asked by the local staff to not upset the clients. It was an unusual request. Turned out, before me another photographer visited that place, who intentionally made subjects cry for the sake of a "good picture". Everyone who worked with me knows that I have a dignity rule in place and such a thing would never occur on my visit.

Sometimes it's appropriate to take a picture and sometimes absolutely not. How do you find out? Simply stay human, don't turn yourself into a cynical picture-taking mechanism. After you leave, the subject should feel respected, taken care of, dignified, and not embarrassed, confused and upset.

• Listen to your customers. Better don't assume that you know what they are looking for when they send you on an assignment. It's your job to make sure that you are on the same page. Getting into fine details of their requirements will help you understand the overall approach. The stakes are high in humanitarian photography: we are dealing with disaster relief, with helping people who rely heavily on humanitarian assistance;

• Find out beforehand everything about the people you're going to meet;

• Write a list of equipment to take with you;

• Have basic medicines with you at all times. Running nose or a sudden onset of fever in the middle of a shoot day is the worst that can happen. It happened to me a lot, so I have a kit of strong medicines with me wherever I go. I also take a course of multivitamins before I set out to shoot in another corner of the world.

• Print out hard copies of all the essential information: contact details in the field, flights, hotels, local emergency numbers;

• Secure yourself a local simcard and local cash;

• This one is very important: every morning before leaving for a shoot switch on every piece of equipment and make a test. I tend to do myself a favor and take a selfie as a test;

• Pay attention to clothes. I'm not good at dressing up fancy, but I do dress appropriately and neat. I need to feel comfortable in my clothes, however. My working day consists of car travels, fast freezing (or sweating) walks with gear on my shoulders, climbing up the stairs, working in hot and choking flats. I don't want to sweat too much and to freeze too much, so proper dressing sometimes turns into a challenge.

• Look nice. My supervisor at the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) told me before my very first assignment: "Remember that for those whom you are filming you are the face of JDC, they don't care whether you're a freelancer or a staff member." I've learned this and always keep it in mind. I tend to visit a hairdresser a few days before my assignment trips.

• Listen actively, but don't produce any sounds. During a shoot or an interview stay in the moment, put aside all your other thoughts, even when you see your camera falling down from a desk (happened to me), even when something goes wrong with the equipment (happened, too). You don't want to hassle with your camera in front of your subject. Have a backup camera ready, even if it's a smartphone, and just keep rolling.

• Backup everything. Coming back to a hotel in the evening as walking dead, I know that there is a mandatory task awaiting me before I fall down senselessly on my bed: copy today's files from the camera to the hard drive and then copy them to another hard drive. If I'm lucky enough to stay in a place with decent WiFi I also upload everything in a cloud. Dozens of people besides myself work hard to make these photo shoots happen, and repeating them is never an option. I keep this in mind.

• Don't get lost in your deliverables. It's all about a simple but cohesive and self-explanatory system of files and folders naming. Luckily I established this system from the very beginning, and now I easily find my pictures from ten years ago. When I import the pictures into Lightroom I also assign them with a few keywords, so whenever my clients need me to send them a selection like "Wintertime in Russia" I can provide it with ease. Labeling the best pictures in Lightroom also saves a lot of time in the long run.

• Lastly, an extremely important one: Be an accurate business person. That's a whole large topic but essentially stay on top of accounting, contracts and deadlines. Deliver more than expected, better than expected, faster than expected. I use Sprout Studio software for my business routine and exploit my natural passion and curiosity to get the pictures delivered very fast, in some cases even on the day of the shoot (photojournalistic background helps me here).

Overall, regardless of all the hardships of the profession, I'm living my dream. I consciously went into the humanitarian photography field, and I'm aiming to learn more lessons that I promise to share after I'm done with my 500th assignment!

Update:

This article was also published by several online photography magazines:

• DIY Photography

• Petapixel

• Bestcamaccessories