CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

David Butow is a freelance photojournalist whose pictures have appeared in National Geographic, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, on the covers of TIME and Newsweek, and in many books and magazines worldwide.

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

I became primarily a magazine photographer in the early 90s, and then into the 2000s and was working mostly with the weekly news magazine, “US News and World Report.” When I would cover news events there were always really good newspaper and wire service photographers around me who were thinking about the assignment in terms of daily news coverage. The whole point of having a magazine photographer in those situations was to get something that would last a bit longer than one day in a newspaper, and these days, a few hours, on a website. Magazines were published weekly or even monthly, so the picture or pictures I made had to be compelling enough to hold the viewer's interest, even though they already knew about the event. I had to go beyond just describing what happened in my photographs. 

And so I started thinking, “What can I extract out of this situation that's still going to be interesting to people a week from now?” Readers already knew about the flood or disaster, or the political candidate, or whatever the event was. When you start asking those kinds of questions, you begin to look for more nuanced moments that were maybe not so obvious right away. I'm always looking for ideas that go beyond answering the “who,” or the “where,” and go into the “why.” I'm also very interested in how these kinds of newsworthy situations are impacting people, not just physically and logistically, but also psychologically. I want to go beyond, “These people have had to move out of their home because of a flood or something like that” and more into, “How does this situation impact these people psychologically?” and “This is a major event for this community, and it's going to stay with them for a long time. What does that look like?” I am more interested in answering these kinds of questions. I  think of this as observational empathy.

Some people like to photograph nature, the environment, animals and things like that, but most of my work has been about people. What I’m trying to do —whether it’s a dynamic news event or it’s people who have been impacted by some social circumstance—is to draw out some kind of idea of what their circumstance is. In order to find that kind of depth with the subject, I think it involves really paying really close attention to them, and using as much empathy as possible to understand what they might be experiencing.

I use the word, “observational,” because you're not always able to communicate directly. There's one picture I made in 2011 when I was in Japan photographing the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami. I was in a middle school that had been turned into a refugee center, and the classrooms of the school were now the places where people had spread out their blankets and where they were basically living. In one of those rooms were only elderly people, and I didn't have an interpreter with me. There was nobody around who spoke English. I don't speak Japanese. I was sitting on the floor, and there was a woman who was probably in her seventies who caught my eye. There was something very compelling about the way she looked. I sat down across from her—just two or three feet away. She had a bandage on her forehead, and I couldn't communicate with her verbally, but I made eye contact with her and she saw my camera. I could just tell by the body language that was being exchanged that she understood why I was there and what I was doing. Through eye contact, I felt I received a sort of a tacit permission to photograph her. This comes up a lot when you're in a place where you can't speak the language. Anyway, I start making pictures, and she's looking right into my camera, and I take a few frames. And then at some point she closed her eyes. It wasn't a blink. She purposefully closed her eyes for a few beats. And I took a picture then, and that ended up being my favorite moment. There's something going on in her mind—maybe she's remembering something, or she's thinking about something to do with the experience of surviving the tsunami. I don't know what it was exactly, but I am sort of interpreting what she might be experiencing, even though I don't know the details of what it is. (See Chapter 2: Contemporary Photojournalism Ethics for more on this topic.)

In a sense, she becomes, not just a single person with a single story, but someone who reflects the overall trauma of this experience. It goes beyond just her story. She becomes almost a symbol of the event. That's sort of an example of the idea of observational empathy—the idea of really paying attention to people. I think it helps you as a journalist to convey the emotions and the experiences of people. And then it also helps you as a photographer, because you're able to anticipate a little bit more what that person might do, or what might happen next, particularly in a very dynamic situation. 

As I mentioned, when I started doing magazine work, I was thinking of pictures that survive beyond the daily news cycle. And then at some point, I started thinking about the fact that I'm getting a little older and realize I'm accumulating, over these decades, a large body of work. I started to think of my work more in the historical context rather than just the journalistic context and that is what led to my book, Brink. When Donald Trump became President, to me it was so shocking. I had never worked in Washington D.C. before. I'd never covered politics in the Capitol before. I was curious what it was like to be in those hearing rooms; what it was like in the White House. What don't you see when you're watching things unfold on TV? What happens just out of the frame of the television cameras? What kind of pictures might you be able to make that aren't daily news pictures, or just of the key figures? Are there tangential events or situations that are not going to make it into the newspaper but might reveal something about the social or political side of this moment? 

And so that's what I was looking for when I was in Washington during those four years. Before the election, I had this joke with friends, “Well, if Trump wins, I'll move to DC to have a front row seat to the apocalypse,” not really thinking that was going to happen. And then it did! At the time, I was based in San Francisco and was starting to get a little tired of just doing tech all the time. I thought of it like an opportunity of a lifetime to go do something like this. So, I just got up and moved to D.C. Fortunately I have an agency, Redux, so that helped get me get my credentials to work on Capitol Hill and at the White House right away. I should point out that I've almost never worked in a situation where I didn't keep the copyright to my photos, except when I was on staff. So, for that reason I didn't want to freelance for Getty or the wire services, particularly. I wanted to keep and own everything that I was doing. So that meant that there were a lot of potential clients and work that I did not do. A lot of the things I photographed on Capitol Hill and at the White House were not on assignment. I was credentialed, so I was able to go. But I was mainly shooting for myself. In my head, what I was thinking of was I want somebody 50 or a 100 years from now to be able to look at these pictures and have a sense of what D.C. and the United States and the political climate was like at that time. And I think that means getting things in your pictures that look kind of ordinary to us right now, but they’re going to be more interesting in the future. So that was very much my intention the whole time I was there.

At the White House, there are some events that are open to only a small number of photographers in the “pool,” which most of the time I was not in, but any time Trump arrived or departed by helicopter from the South Lawn, I could go. Most of the time he would stop and talk to the press, so there would be a possibility to photograph him up close. I didn’t usually get anything interesting, but now and then I would get something I liked. It became a practice, in a way. Part of the ability to be in the right place at the right time is familiarizing yourself as much as possible with these situations. Then, when stuff does come up and everybody's scrambling around to try to get in somewhere—if you've already done it, you know how to get there, you know what the protocol is and what the logistics might be.

One of the beautiful things about photography, or creative experiences, as a whole, is that there's no endgame—there's no perfect picture that you can take of anything. It doesn't exist. You can photograph the same subject in an infinite number of ways, right? Therefore, you don't have to be the same photographer that you were five years ago, or twenty years ago, or whatever. And why would you want to be, anyway? 

Because of my own personal interest in politics, coupled with what was happening with our country and government, combined with my interest in creating a body of work with more of a historical emphasis—that all coalesced. I think my book, Brink, is the culmination of it all. To be honest, during that time, Trump was so active on Twitter that what used to be the daily news cycle became like the hourly news cycle. People were just sitting at their computers or on their phones scrolling and scrolling all of the time. So to me, there was never a better time to do a book, because this was not the way that people have been seeing these pictures of those years. They have been seeing images on phones or computer screens that were designed to be eye-catchy and quick. I wanted to do the opposite of that. I wanted to take pictures that were a little bit looser. I use lenses that were a little bit wider than what most of the other photographers were using. I wanted to encourage the viewer to look around the image and find little things that would be interesting to them now, and hopefully, will be even more interesting to people in the future.

I've taught a few workshops that I call Zen photography and part of the philosophy is to free up as much of your own creative space, and maybe journalistic space, in your brain as possible. In order to do that, it helps just to have as much of your own stuff figured out ahead of time, before you even walk out the door. Have your gear set up. Know where you might be staying or where you might need to stay. Another thing I like to do is use the travel time when I'm going to an assignment, whether you're driving or you're on the plane, to think about what you want to do. For me, the question is usually, “Is there something that I can bring to the assignment that's a little bit more personal or a little bit different from what everybody else has been doing? And hopefully the answer will be ‘yes’ so I have to figure out what that is and how to do it

For example, when the mass shooting happened in Uvalde, Texas, I left the next day— the day after the shooting, and had already seen, for about twenty-four hours, the news coverage of the shooting.. So, I had an idea of what the scene looked like from TV and the photographs online. That was not unusual, especially with local journalists everywhere I’m rarely in the first wave of photographers on the scene. So when I’m on the plane, I’m starting to think about my own vision and a unique approach—my personal, intellectual and emotional response to the situation. And I'm always trying to draw out what might make my coverage different. I hate to use the word unique, because I don't know that it's unique—maybe a better word is “distinctive” from what other visual journalists are doing. 

I think a lot depends on what my responsibilities are, and sometimes, as photographers, we find ourselves in situations where we feel like the editors are expecting us to get a version of what everybody else is getting. In those situations, then sometimes you do feel like there is more pressure to stay with the group, so you don't miss a key shot that everyone else has gotten. If you have the luxury of not having that kind of pressure then I think it's much easier to step aside, literally and metaphorically, and look for your own perspective. 

It happens a lot in micro-situations where you're literally standing around with people and wondering if you should go ten feet over here or ten feet that way, and everybody's going this way, and does it make sense to go around the other side? And then it happens in broader situations when you're thinking, ‘Should I go to this town or that town? Go to the park, to the school or to the church?’ You hear everybody's going to this church, so do you want to try to go to a different church? You're always questioning yourself. But I would say that it's always good to question the group mentality. It doesn’t mean they’re always wrong, but it doesn't mean they're always right, either. 

There's also a tendency when there's a pause in the action for photographers to stand around and talk to each other—you see it all the time. I'm not asocial, but I'm not super social, so it doesn't bother me to not be part of the group. I usually prefer just to walk around by myself and look for stuff to photograph. I think a lot of my better pictures have come from off moments or things where it doesn't seem like there might be something happening. I'm always trying to stay engaged and trying to find something that’s interesting to me. I think that comes from not having a preconception of the kinds of pictures that you might get. So that’s another tip: Be very open minded. That's where the Zen concept comes in. I think it's great to have a general intention or idea of what you're trying to do, but try not to overly preconceive the pictures you might make. Allow yourself to observe the nuances of the situation— which goes back to that phrase, “observational empathy.”