Progress

I was interested in photographing the process of things. I wanted to look at motion and the way the body moves when in motion. I also wanted to look at this from different vantage points. At first, I was obsessed with the idea of voyeurism, and shooting it accordingly. But, as I was photographing, I realised that there were photographs that just didn't make sense for a voyeur to look at. So, I then focused more on the action rather than making it look creepy. This project really pushed me to look at things differently, to think before I shoot and to understand which vantage point works best. Before I took each picture, I would think of the different angles and also shoot the same motions in different angles (if what the subject was doing allowed me to do so). I think if I were to continue with this project, I would focus more on the content. Perhaps I would split it into two - dissecting simple motions (i.e. walk, run, dance) and dissecting private moments. 

Carl Mydans

"Unlike, say, Smith, who planned his pictures in sequences and fought over how they would be laid out on the page, Mr. Mydans specialized in getting one picture that told the story by itself. As a result, he proved most useful to Life's editors when space was tight and news was breaking." - NYT Carl Mydans' Obituary

Mydans photographs capture a lot in one photo, I think this is very true. Though, I felt that perhaps there were certain reasons for that, one being that he did not exactly go to the country with an agenda of taking a collection of photographs. Rather, he was captured and took photographs of his stay there. In that way perhaps, there was less thought and more about getting the moment. In a way, I felt that he had incredible moments in his photographs, like the one with the French woman who was accused of sleeping with Germans and thus had to have her head shaved while other people looked and laughed. That picture was incredibly powerful.

Mydans doesn't try anything tricky, only captures raw human emotion and I definitely got that from his photographs. I think this is an incredible quality to have as a war photographer -- it's not necessarily about the angle or the lighting, but simply about the human's emotions.

"Mydans has said that he has always been a people-watcher, looking at posture and the telling gesture which might reveal something of the person. He would watch mouths and look for falseness. As he began to understand this unspoken language and interpret what he was so carefully observing he wrote, 'I had found a source of stories as wide and as varied and as captivating as the human race.'" -- Marianne Fulton