livebooks blog

Students at the National Geographic Photo Camp in Rajasthan, India, learning to use a camera for the first time. © Ed Kashi

1/5/09

The first day of the workshop was frustrating due to a selfish teaching assistant. I was tired and cold and wanted to go home. Until then the workshop had not been satisfying; the kids were too timid, unengaged with us, and the conceit of the structure of the workshop began to show through for me. The power and importance of education is what I learn from these experiences, not always smooth or easy.

This workshop was a challenge, to bridge the gaps between us and the students, as well as between the city and rural kids. By day three the magic had begun, with the shy and nervous rural kids finding their voices and comfort levels, expressing themselves more openly to the instructors as well as their urban workshop mates. Likewise, the city kids began to shed their pretensions and superiority complexes, opening up and letting themselves just have fun.

By the end of the workshop the kids had made new friends, the shy had come out of their shells and the smart city kids had shown tremendous teamwork and supported their non-English-speaking rural peers. It was heart warming to see how well the two groups coalesced to support one another, had fun by sharing music and other teenage things, and ultimately moved past their previous stereotypical impressions of one another. Breaking down barriers is what this workshop and my life are dedicated to.

During the workshop’s graduation ceremony, my team of 5 students created and presented me with a poster; I’ve included a few of my favorite comments from it below. I love the first one, written by a stick-thin and very shy village girl named Deepika, who was crying the first day trying to hold a camera to her face and close one eye, something we photographers take for granted but for her was an impossibly weird and discomfiting thing to do.

Deepika…“I like your nature and behavior. I love the way you talk. We were able to learn lot from you and I even like you.”

From another student…“You teach us really nicely. You are very joyful person, which keep us energetic.”

Darhmendra….”I love your style of photography and how you solve our problems.”

"Hay Bales" © Brian Kosoff

At the end of my last post I had decided to close my studio. I open this post with the admission that I’m glad I did! I still keep in touch with many of my old clients and studio-mates, but talking to them about work is not a cheery walk down memory lane — it’s a bummer. Fewer and fewer photographers have their own studios. The majority share, but in cramped conditions. Now you’ll find five photographers sharing 2,000 square feet: a ratio likely to create stress and conflict. Some photographers I know shoot family portraits for the general public, something that would have been embarrassing for them to pursue ten years ago.

My work is much more solitary now and I miss the camaraderie of other photographers, assistants, and stylists (and the catered lunches!) that I had in the studio. Sometimes I don’t speak with anyone in person, except a motel clerk, for months. I joke that when I get back home from one of my trips, I hand my wife a credit card and ask for a non-smoking room. Still, I consider myself very fortunate. On an almost daily basis I get to see some truly magnificent sights and I get to drink some of the best and worst road coffee out there. (Best: ANY Scandinavian country. Worst: the U.S.).

"Dune Silhouette" © Brian Kosoff

As for my landscape photography, it’s still a work in progress. I‘m relatively new to it, and while it didn’t take too long to master the technical aspects, I’m still trying to figure out why I’m drawn to certain subjects. It took me a while to realize that my fondness for a minimal style, often having a center oriented composition and a high-key or white background, was a direct result of having spent more than 20 years shooting minimal, center oriented, often white background product photographs. I guess that even when you change directions, you still carry some of the momentum from your earlier motion.

Change is inevitable and it’s often feared, but I consider my change from advertising to landscape photography an opportunity. For me now, my work is more satisfying than ever, and life is simpler. That’s a change for the better.

On the job at Cape Crozier, Antarctica. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

When I wrote the “Live from the Poles” proposal with the WHOI Director of Communications, this was our justification and plan for the embedded media team:

“Insightful writing and compelling images are the heart of every successful publication. The core of this project is support for a professional science writer and field photographer to join each expedition. Scientists are frequently working around the clock when in the field, and have little time to describe their fieldwork with written dispatches and photography. They also cannot be expected to have the training required to produce professional photographs and video clips. To ensure that the groundbreaking research conducted during this historical period [International Polar Year] is properly documented, support for the writer/photographer team is critical to this proposal. The team will be responsible for filing daily dispatches including science updates, logistical challenges, team member profiles, and life at sea (or on the ice). The team will also coordinate real-time phone patches from PIs [Principal Investigators] in the field to museum audiences, National Public Radio stations, Scholastic magazine, and manage student Q&As with scientists. An experienced shore-based team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will manage Web updates from the field, and prepare publication of photo essays and articles in Oceanus magazine, which receives 30,000 visits online each month.”

To summarize, we were cognizant of the lack of quality photographs coming out of scientific expeditions and saw an opportunity to assemble a professional team to tell visual stories from the field. The trick was to do it daily from some of the most remote places in the world.

So why photograph science fieldwork? There has never been a more important time to understand how our planet works. Glaciers and Arctic pack ice are shrinking at an unprecedented rate. Rising temperatures are causing profound shifts in ecosystems. In the October issue of Scientific American, John Holdren, a Harvard physicist and President-elect Obama’s White House science adviser, wrote that “the ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.” According to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a consensus of the world’s scientific experts, we (human beings) are causing unprecedented changes to our climate.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a doom and gloom kind of guy. Despite the challenges that rising global temperatures will present in the coming years, I believe in human ingenuity and resilience. And scientists are out there in some of the harshest places on our planet, like the Greenland Ice Sheet and Antarctica, collecting data on past and present changes so we can better predict future conditions.

I’m an idealist; I see science as a noble, selfless profession. By photographing scientists in the field, I am hoping to communicate a deeper understanding and respect for the scientific process and profession, and to urge people to use scientific knowledge of the world to help sustain it.

At the National Geographic Photo Camp that Ed taught in Rajasthan, a "city kid" photographs a cow. © Ed Kashi

1/4/09

We’re in Jhadol, a small village nearly two hours drive outside of Udaipur to teach 20 teenagers, 10 from the city of Udaipur and 10 from the villages of this area. This is one of several National Geographic Photo Camps, which use photography and visual storytelling to foster cultural exchange and to open new vistas of awareness for these kids. The goal is not to create photographers, although that would be lovely. Instead, we are trying to empower these young people to tell the stories of their lives, communities, and families, thereby opening their eyes to their own world while sharing their vital and meaningful stories with outsiders.

I believe strongly in the power of photography to teach, to raise awareness, and to intimately and dramatically bring to life our stories, our issues, and our subconscious concerns. I have witnessed this power in countless situations, including refugee camps in Uganda, rural villages of Oaxaca, Mexico, the Latino district of San Francisco, and the South Bronx. These are the other National Geographic photo camps I’ve been a part of, but beyond this one set of experiences, I’ve been reminded repeatedly that photography has an uncanny, unique power to inspire, to prick the questioning mind, to discover beauty, and to express the intimate and personal.

It is this nexus of passion for, belief in, and commitment to the unique universe of visual storytelling that compels me to keep on driving forward, moving against the current odds, the dire predictions and blatant economic and structural trends. I cannot stop, nor do I believe I should. There is a usefulness, potency, and necessity to photography.

Showing my work from the Niger Delta to teens in the south Bronx or a village in India elicits the same response: indignation, surprise, and horror at the social, economic and environmental injustices of that story. These reactions exemplify the universal language of photography and the power of what I can achieve with my work.