Is it possible to remain neutral and objective while shooting?
It’s not impossible, though it’s not the way I work. I’m a journalist of attachment; I shoot my best pictures when I’m angry about something. When I was in Sudan I was only there for five days. I remember the plane landing and, as the door to the plane opened, I saw all these people standing there naked in the heat with begging bowls. They weren’t actually begging, they were just standing there in silence. I knew I would make strong images. Famine is one of those things that people photograph all of the time – I think Clare Short coined the phrase ‘famine pornography’ – so I knew I was going to get stick about the images back home. But I felt angry about it. Why is this kind of stuff still happening when America can spend $250,000 a minute on a war? You have to think ‘what the hell is going on?’ We’ve been taken to war by some clown of a president, with this arrogance that we should be telling people in Iraq how they should live. It’s crazy. People are dying there because of one man’s insistence to do what he wants to do.
Colour video footage should, by rights, show more detail than a still image. Yet your pictures seem so much more evocative. Why is that?
Video flashes in front of you, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. But a good still image can imbed itself into your brain and is retained there for much longer. If a photograph moves you, you can go away and make a cup of tea, and sit down and look at it again and see something else. It’s a much more powerful medium.
Until 9/11 I would challenge anyone to name a piece of video footage that really moves you. Maybe the Challenger disaster would be one, but my point is it’s not as easy to remember an iconic piece of video footage as it is to think of Nick Ut’s picture of the Vietnamese girl running down the road after a napalm attack, or Joe Rosenthal’s shot of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima.
You shoot almost all your pictures in mono these days, and using short focal length lenses on Leica rangefinders. Why is that?
I dumped the zooms and telephoto lenses, and the other equipment of Fleet Street to use these little [Leica] cameras, and I felt more at home with the simplicity of it all. You make great pictures with your head and your heart and not with a box of fancy tricks and flashing lights.
I wanted the camera to be part of me and feel intimate, so I started to work closer to people, with 28mm, 35mm, and 50mm lenses, and began to really look into their eyes. And it was more intimate, and my pictures became more intimate and powerful as a result. That’s the way I like to work: hunting the moment. Presenting myself and waiting for the moment – a flicker of the eyes or an expression that gives. Also, you don’t feel you are stealing images, as it often does when you are 20 feet away from your subject with a 200mm lens.
I soon began to understand this collaboration where, even if I didn’t speak my subject’s language and they don’t speak mine either, I had to present myself in a way that makes it obvious I’m a photographer. They can either allow me into their space, to observe what they are doing, or they can move away themselves or raise a hand to indicate they don’t want me there, and that’s fine.
There’s a picture I once shot in Sudan – an incredible scene – of a woman giving birth on one side of the frame, and a guy on the other who’s been brought in from the sun to die. I think I only shot three or four frames of that – it was an intense situation, and there was so much light flooding into the hut, I was thinking ‘this lens is never going to handle this’, but it did.
And why black & white?
It’s a cliché, but someone once told me that if you shoot in colour, you see the colour of someone’s clothes; if you shoot them in black & white you see the colour of their soul. That’s always stuck in my mind. In looking for my own photographic style I’ve stripped away everything. If you can see someone’s eyes you have a fair chance of seeing what’s going on in their mind. Mono is a much more powerful way of doing that. Plus I’m not a very good colour photographer, which is possibly nearer the truth.
If someone said ‘how can I be the next Tom Stoddart?’ what would you say?
Work very hard, that’s an important thing. I had an assistant called Leonie Purchas who was with me for two years before going to LCC and Fabrica in Italy. She’s just won the Arts Foundation Fellowship Photojournalism category, actually. In a way people of her age have more opportunity than I ever did. At her stage I was standing in the rain for The Daily Mail.
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