Reflections on 'For Their Own Good'

Since the late 1990s, photojournalists have relied almost entirely on digital cameras to capture images. The cameras used at the St. Petersburg Times and most other newspapers can shoot about eight pictures per second. They focus automatically if you want them to, they set the exposure automatically if you want them to. With the money some of the lenses cost, you could buy a nice used car, or make a down payment on a house. The images taken with these electronic wonders are then transmitted in just a few moments. The result is fast, efficient and beautiful, but for me something is lost. This electronic do-it-all-at-a-million-miles-an-hour photojournalism isn't the same photography I first fell in love with.

I'll admit to being a total tech-junkie, but sometimes it's refreshing and creatively liberating to step away from that. When I began making images for the "For Their Own Good" story, I knew I wanted an approach that was different from my daily work for the Times.

Enter the medium format film camera, two actually: a $28 plastic-lensed Russian toy camera called a Holga, and a very expensive camera called a Hasselblad, made by a Swedish company that has manufactured the same model, virtually unchanged, since the 1950s. Both are completely mechanical. They don't need batteries to function and produce 12 square images (6 x 6 cm) on a roll of 120 film, roughly quadruple the size of a 35mm frame or digital SLR camera sensor. The large negative size records fine details and a tonal range beyond that in most digital images, or on 35mm film.

In 1997 my soon-to-be stepmother gave me a book of black and white images by Texas art photographer Keith Carter. I didn't know at the time (I was just getting into photography), but the book would have a huge impact on how I made pictures from then on. The first thing to strike me was the serenity in his work. The second was the tonality; his pictures had this lifelike richness I had never seen before. The third was that all the pictures were square. I had to know how he did this. I started asking around and learned about the Hasselblad. "A Hassa-what-a?" I wanted one. Then I learned how much. A basic kit was somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000.

I slaved at jobs I hated during my last two years of high school -- first at a pet store, then a camera shop -- trying to save enough for a Hasselblad kit. I could have bought a wickedly cool car by teenager standards. Instead I drove a beat-up Acura Integra with nearly 300,000 miles on the odometer. The passenger floorboard flooded when it rained. The water turned foul in the Houston heat, so the car always smelled of mildew. The CD player ate discs and didn't give them back. The car vibrated ominously when idling at red lights. I didn't care. I wanted the camera. Fixing the car meant less money for my goal. In the end, I failed. The low-paying jobs just didn't cut it, but my dad helped out, as did relatives who gave checks instead of presents when I graduated from high school.

I remember the day I bought it. Calling my bank to get a four-digit check cleared. Buckling up the bag of camera gear in the passenger seat. Worrying it might fall into the puddle on the floorboards if I had to hit the brakes suddenly. Driving home carefully on Interstate 10 during rush hour.

I used it throughout college. Later, I kept coming back to it, even though it's hardly an ideal tool for a newspaper photojournalist. My first-ever published photo story was shot with the camera, a portrait series of Civil War re-enactors in the rural town of Tunbridge, Vt. With my normal "super-do-it-all" digital cameras I may take a hundred frames of something. With the Hassy, as it's often called by photographers, I am forced to slow down and think more about what I'm doing. The camera often requires a tripod, making it difficult to work quickly. The film isn't cheap, which discourages shooting carelessly. I want to make every one of those 12 frames count.

Fast-forward to November of 2008. I am tasked with photographing a man named Roger Kiser in southern Georgia who claims that decades ago he was abused at the Florida School for Boys. I load the car with a ridiculous amount of photo equipment: strobes, digital cameras, light stands, lenses, extension cords, the Hassy and a few rolls of 120 film I had just discovered in the back of my refrigerator (which helps preserve the quality of film emulsion). I wanted to shoot a few large format frames, just to see what would happen.

When the film came back from the lab, I knew that I must keep shooting with the Hassy. They had a quality that wasn't in the digital images, something that felt right. I didn't use the lights, the cords or any of that pile of gear I packed, just the fading autumn sun as it dipped below the tree line.

Over the next five months more men came forward claiming they were also abused at the Florida School for Boys. I repeated this simple method of working dozens of times. My collection of photographs grew from one man to nearly thirty. It is still growing.

A lot of my work for the Times and Bay magazine involves heavy use of location lights, a studio and sometimes an assistant. For this story I wanted simple but intriguing images. I wanted the viewer to say "Wow, what a horrible thing for this person to go through," not, "I wonder how the photographer did that."

I used no artificial lighting except in one photograph out of more than a hundred. I organized my shooting around the natural light, getting up before dawn for a particular location, when the sun broke over the trees. I interrupted interviews for portraits because the light outside was suddenly magical. I revisited locations at different times of day to compare the quality of light. Overcast days became my best friend. The gray, flat lighting added a melancholy feeling that fit the mood of the story.

It was also about establishing a rapport with the men. I began to notice a hollowness, sometimes anger, in their eyes. I noticed the deep lines in their faces, suggesting years of hard living. This is what I began to zero in on. They told the story better than any embellishment I could add with fancy lighting or dramatic composition. If the pictures are stylized in any way, I think it is in their simplicity. Many look almost like police mug shots. This was intentional on my part.

Thinking about it now, they actually look much like that first photo story I shot in Vermont, all in that square format (my favorite) with natural light, and a sparse composition. They look like many of my college photos. Some might even have a little influence of Keith Carter's early work lurking in there. Some things never change. SEE "FOR THEIR OWN GOOD" [EDMUND FOUNTAIN, Times]