Each week we profile a western Canadian farm family in the paper and call it On Farm. We usually don’t spend more than a few hours with the featured family interviewing the husband, wife and maybe children, while photographing them on their farm.
I think this is where the term snapshot came from: photographing quickly and not spending a significant amount of time with the subject. I think it also means, in most cases shooting one, maybe two frames. What you get is a small glimpse or brief summary into the subject – in this case, life of a farm family.
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Sometimes that’s all the time you get and maybe all you need. Is it accurate as to who they are? An excellent photograph can only be a snapshot of a complex human being.
I try to document people when they’re involved in an event. This usually keeps their focus away from the photographer and that all too common need to control the situation and their image. The photographer has a job to do and that is to make pictures without getting into them: to tell a story and not become the story.
So much of the newspaper photographer’s reality involves getting in and out of situations quickly. It’s usually because we are working backwards from the industry deadlines of editing, layout and printing. Time is money. Quite literally: if the printing presses wait, it can be thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
