CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Ken Light is a social documentary photographer and educator based in northern California. He is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley. His work has been widely published in hundreds of periodicals. He has fourteen books showcasing his powerful photography projects, has exhibited internationally in over 225 one-person and group shows and is included in numerous collections including the San Francisco MoMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography, the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress and many others including private collections. Light is the recipient of a many awards, fellowships and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Photographers Fellowships, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation as well as grants from the Soros Open Society Institute, the American Film Institute, the California Arts Commission, International Fund for Concerned Photography, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Max and the Anna Levinson Foundation as well as the Johnathan Logan Family Foundation.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Right from the start, I just dove into doing long form stories. One of the earliest stories I did was on high school. I was 21 years old—I'm barely out of high school, myself. I probably wrote 20 letters to all different high schools. I ended up getting into four or five high schools to photograph.

The first high school I worked in was in the Bronx—an all-male public high school. They let me walk around, go in and out of classrooms. At that time, access was not as difficult as it is today. I would say that the most important problem photographers have today is how to get access. There are so many stories that are just closed off to us now.

Having photographed presidents starting with Nixon and then having done the same with Trump—there is just a huge difference in what they allow you to do and what they do not allow you to do. They tightly control everything.

Anyway, I photographed the school in the Bronx, and then at the same time I got permission to go back to my old high school on Long Island. The idea was to have the suburban school, which was largely white, and the urban school, which was all people of color.

Probably one of the biggest career mistakes I have ever made was, at that time, I had finished the high school project, and reached out to Harper and Row, which had just started publishing a photo book series. I sent them a box of 8”x10” darkroom prints from the project. I got a letter back saying they really loved the work and would I come and talk to them. So I went to New York and met with the editor who was overseeing the book series. He really liked the project and said, “you know, this is great but we think you need to go back and make more pictures.” And when you are 21 years old, when you're finished, you're finished. So I told him I wasn't  interested in going back and the project was never published. I was too headstrong. But I kept going.  

People often ask, “how do you find a project?” And to me, I'm just curious. One of the great gifts of being a photographer is you can follow your curiosity, unlike other professions.

My next project was photographing a shoe factory outside of Athens, Ohio in a town called Nelsonville. There was a shoe factory that was the main business of this small rural S.E. Ohio Appalachian town. It had been built during the Great Depression. I was curious, political and interested in working class people and what the world of work was about.

I spoke to the owner of the company and told him I was a student at Ohio University and I was really interested in photographing the shoe factory. And he said, “oh, sure. Anytime you want to come.” I literally probably spent a year in that shoe factory. I'd go a couple times a week, sometimes more, and walk around the shoe factory, talking to people, photographing them, giving them prints. They invited me to their weddings, their baseball games, their homes. My idea was to do a book. I was heavily influenced by photo books—Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street had come out. Larry Clark's Tulsa had come out. Danny Lyons, Conversations with the Dead was another one that was published around that time.  You couldn’t see books online because there was no internet, so the visual resource was going to the bookstore or the school library and looking at photo books, seeing how they edited and sequenced them and how they told stories.

After about six months, I felt like I had taken every picture that you could possibly take in that shoe factory, which was again, because I was a young, naive photographer.  I decided I needed a break. All along, I had been editing and printing the photographs. After a couple of months, and thinking and going through the box of prints and contact sheets I realized there was probably stuff I hadn't seen. One of the great gifts of doing that project in particular was to be confined in a space. Being in a confined space really taught me a lot about how to see and how to think about making photographs. 

I continued photographing around Athens (Ohio)—events, protests, Appalachia.  Then in 1973, I picked up and moved to California after I graduated and  headed to the West Coast. I literally didn’t have a dime, (just) a $100 cash and a Shell credit card for gas, which landed me with bad credit for seven years when I couldn't pay it back. After a year of arriving, I  began to photograph in West Oakland even though I had no darkroom and limited resources. I had to work minimum wage jobs, but dived into a two-year project in West Oakland and then began to try to develop a freelance practice. I decided early on that the best job prospect was doing design and layout, partly because I didn’t like working with an editor or short assignments, my dream was being a documentary photographer. I got a job working for a small shopper—an advertising paper that was mailed to people's homes. I worked two and a half days a week and one night, so I had a lot of free time to photograph. That’s another challenge for photographers—finding the time to go out and do these stories and photograph. If you're working five days a week, you come home exhausted. So that job helped me move forward in photography. 

Then, maybe two or three years after arriving, I began teaching at a community college part-time, and then for a number of years, I taught part-time in many different schools, we called ourselves migrant teachers.  I kept photographing and learned how to write grants for funding and immersed myself in the Bay Area photo community.. Each project led to another and another. I published my first book, a project on farm workers (With These Hands).  I also received a National Endowment for the Arts photography fellowship and also a NEA survey grant. That work had led me to the border, where I did a project called To The Promised Land . My farmworker project had led me to see how undocumented farm workers were coming into the U.S. I'd spent three or four years working on this project independently. And just kept moving forward.

My projects are born from curiosity—maybe a friend or colleague mentions something or I might see a little article in the New York Times that piques my interest. The projects I pick are usually those that no one's interested in at the time. Maybe a publication will send a photographer for a half day or day to get just illustrations for a story, but there's no depth. You don't really get to see beyond the two hours that the photographer was there. And I'm just not that type of photographer. I’ve carved out a path so that I can pursue long term projects. I've gotten many grants over the years, but let’s be serious. I don't stay at the Ritz Carlton when I am working, I stay in inexpensive hotels and eat from the street. And I'm still shooting film, which is expensive.

Look, Lewis Hine died penniless and he's considered one of the great fathers of documentary photography. To do this work is not easy and has never been easy. But if you're passionate about storytelling, then you're going to find a way to do it. Try a Kickstarter for your project—even your friends who are underemployed like you are can still kick in $10 or $25. And if you have enough friends or people interested in your story, you can raise the money to move forward. That's a whole different way of raising the money than we had, it might have made my projects easier to get supported.

You have to really think about what your story is, how important it is to you and how long you can spend on it. I think another challenge for younger photographers, as I mentioned with my high school project, is they don't have as much patience to spend three or four years on a project— going back and forth and back and forth. They're finished in a year or maybe even six months and they’re done and moving on. I really have to push younger photographers to think about investing the time to do the story. And it's not just about the story. It's also about your development as a photographer—how you see and how you think about storytelling and how you push yourself in the milieu of your subject matter, getting access and going back and looking at the work you made the first year and seeing what's missing. And in your second or third year, you go back to the first year and there are pictures that you missed when you were editing. It's all part of the excitement of doing these projects to me.

Another piece of advice is to have someone able to write something about your project. I do the rest myself—editing, sequencing and even the maquette (a book dummy) of how I want the book to look.  I like to have a mantra that relates to my project idea —something that I can think about when I am out photographing and keeps me focused on why I am (doing the work).  Very often the title of the project and book comes from the mantra.

Being brutal with your selection—this is the hardest part of editing. Photographers fall in love with pictures, we all do, and they often repeat themselves over and over again, because they love the composition or the moment. In a book, you have to really think about how pictures play off of each other, and how, when you flip a page, what is the next picture. Then you create a kind of visual symphony. That's exactly how I think about it. A lot of times people will ask why there is a blank page— it's because you want people to stop on a picture or to stop and take a pause before turning to see the next sequence. You're thinking about all of these things. You're also looking at how the compositions mesh together either as different or similar—but adding to each other. Photographers tend to put two similar pictures next to each other—I know my students do this a lot. But when you put them next to each other, they both lose power. You have to have something that's different—that makes each picture powerful. Books are very personal and exciting to create and something to work towards. I always have believed that good in-depth photography will eventually see the light of day, the struggle is doing that work and not being discouraged. Now that I have decades as a photographer I have begun to go into my archive and pull out those in-depth projects that at the time no one was interested in. The great gift of a photograph is that it stops time and we can’t go back, so those photographs that are unpublished become more and more important to history and have a new life and new possibilities.

Ever since I first picked up a camera as a young eighteen year old kid, it has been to show the issues and people who need justice and need to have a voice in our country. I'm still working on it.