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Ten works which have inspired me
1. James Agee and Walker Evans. 1941: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Sent in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the poverty of white sharecroppers in Alabama, Agee and photographer Evans stretched out the assignment and made a book instead. Agee didn't have a rule book to tell him what precisely to document. So he precisely documented everything: from the depth of dust in a drawer to his passionate feelings for one of his subjects. Here he observes a family preparing to be photographed by Evans: "...looking into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other..."
2. Dana Atchley. Next Exit (link opens in a new window, QuickTime required). Follow the "Next Exit Stories" link on the left-hand side of the screen and look at Home Movies (aka The Turn Film) and Redheads. I paid my first visit to Atchley's site in the spring of 2000 and we immediately began an email exchange. He invited me to attend a Centre for Digital Storytelling workshop in Berkeley, California, later that year... which I did.
3. Roland Barthes. 1981: Camera Lucida, reflections on photogaphy. After years of dispassionate analysis Barthes comes across a photograph of his mother as a child, the "winter garden photograph". He allows his feelings to influence his logic and suddenly the ideas start bouncing off the page: "I had discovered this photograph by moving back through Time? I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love. Starting from her latest image, taken the summer before her death (so tired, so noble, sitting in front of the door of our house, surrounded by my friends), I arrived, traversing three quarters of a century, at the image of a child: I stare intensely at the Sovereign Good of childhood, of the mother, of the mother-as-child. Of course I was then losing her twice over, in her final fatigue and in her first photograph, for me the last; but it was also at this moment that everything turned around and I discovered her as unto herself. "
4. Bruce Davidson. 1969: Beautiful, Beautiful. BBC TV Omnibus documentary about four photographers. At one point Davidson, who was working on East 100th St. his book about Harlem, says: "I poise, not pose, people... People have an innate dignity and they will set themselves before the camera in a dignified way. And they will choose what they will give."
5. Ivan Illich. 1975: Tools for Conviviality: "Tools are intrinsic to social relationships", he writes. "An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision."
6. Greil Marcus, his rock 'n' roll writings. Here's one from American Folk in Granta 76. 2001: "But no one is just like anybody else. No one, in fact is even who he or she was ever supposed to be. No one was supposed to step out from their fellows and stand alone to say their piece, to thrill those who stand and listen with the notion that they, too might have a voice, to shame those who stand and listen because they lack the courage to do more than that."
Also Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. 1997: Marcus studies popular music recordings and lifts the lid on a nation's dustbin of history.
7. Pedro Meyer. 1991: I Photograph to Remember (link opens in a new window). First published as an interactive CD-ROM, this intensely moving story about Meyer's parents in old age is now available for iPod download. I first saw it during a screening at Impressions Gallery, York, in the summer of 1994. Aside from its length (35 minutes) it is, in every other respect, a "Digital Story". My first.
8. Jeremy Seabrook. 1973: City Close-up. Wonderful English oral history done in Blackburn, Lancashire. The book by which all other books of oral history must be measured.
9. W G Sebald. 1996: The Emigrants. 1999: The Rings Of Saturn. Storytelling and pictures never went so well together. These books take you into a magical space which is entirely, uniquely and infinitely their own.
10. William Stott. 1973: Documentary Expression and Thirties America: "Social documentary dignifies the usual and levels the extraordinary. Most often its subject is the common man, and when it is not, the subject, however exalted he be, is looked at from the common man's point-of view."