Word Muses

Before I go to a family’s home for a documentary photography session, I send them a list of questions to think about. We then get on the phone and chat for about half an hour. The questions and subsequent phone call have a few practical purposes: getting to know one another/building trust, setting expectations, and getting practical information about scheduling and light in the home. Most important of all, though, is it allows me to go to someone’s home with a bit of scaffolding to build a story on.

I take notes during this phone call, which I keep in a file so that I’ll always be able to refer back to it when I need to remember someone’s name or important details like which child loved which stuffed animal at this particular time. But if you were to break into my computer and steal these files, you would probably think I was the weirdest, most woo-woo person ever and not a real professional because the notes appear to be full of random words and useless information (in addition to practical things like names and the time I’m supposed to show up). Here are some of the words that have made an appearance:

togetherness

historical

table

spaciousness

root

island

stage

close

I’ve done some online training for documentary family photography that suggests identifying a muse once you arrive for a session. This doesn’t mean that you only photograph this person, but the idea is that most of the interesting things happen around the muse. If you keep your eye on the muse and what they’re doing, you’ll end up with better storytelling photos for everyone.

I sometimes do this, but what’s even more helpful to me is latching onto certain word themes that come up repeatedly when I’m chatting with a client. If it keeps coming up, there’s a deeper story happening here. They’re no longer just words, but symbols for something deeply meaningful to this family.

Sometimes getting ready to check out of a hotel with kids is really hard.

conversation piece

questions

cherry Pez

celebrate

bond

safe

looking

silly

trust

enjoy

laugh

Some of these are easy to guess why they’re meaningful, others not so much (but I know and the family knows). None of them are just words; they’re compasses, tone-setters, a finger pointing you in the right direction, pegs to hang a story on.

I’ll always spend some time thinking about the word muse(s) that revealed itself to me before I go to a family’s home, and I’ve wondered if this might cause me to come into a situation with too much of a preconceived notion of who the people are. True, these are words that were given to me by the client, but maybe this word feels differently in my hands than it would in yours. Thinking this way is pointless, though. Art created by humans is never objective. We all bring our own unique equation of experience and personality to the things we create. That’s why there are lots of different choices of photographers for people to hire.

A family’s entire story—what they share, how they love one another and make a life together—can never be contained in just a word or two. But also, it can’t be contained in a set of photos from one documentary photography session. Both these words and the photos they inspire are a way of scratching the surface and trying to get to the good stuff. I want future generations to look at the photos and get an idea of who the people in them were and what mattered to them. The words give me a good place to start.