The ultimate photography cliche is someone holding a camera and saying ‘smile!’ or ‘say “cheese!”’. The intention is simple, capture a moment where everyone looks happy. But of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds. As a human being, I think you can tell when someone is genuinely happy in a photo, and as a photographer, you know how hard it is to actually capture that moment of genuine happiness. Plus, everyone knows that a ‘real photographer’ only captures moments of angst, or urban decay, or tragedy. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time convincing myself that the photo of a person looking sad is more ‘real’ than the photo of the person looking happy.
At the same time we are living this bizarre dichotomy where our social media feeds are full of people looking performatively happy, while the news is telling us that everything is falling to pieces. In this brave new digital world, fear and anger are greater motivators of ‘engagement’ than positivity and joy, and so we’re fed a constant stream of content designed to make us angry.
It’s enough to make you want to just throw your phone in the ocean, or find religon…or at the very least, start a podcast.
So what can I do? Well, I did some quick research, and fixing climate change, spreading equality and re-balancing the economy, felt like a lot of work. And my podcast never really took off.
So instead I set myself the challenge of putting some positive things back into the world, and the idea of capturing a series of people looking genuinely happy was born.
My 50th birthday was coming up, and the idea of taking 50 photos felt like a good idea. I also really wanted to take the photos at the Preston Market, as that was somewhere I’ve been going for pretty much my whole life, and felt like somewhere I could get a good cross-section of people. Plus I thought it would be a bit easier to get people talking about something that made them smile, by talking to them about what they usually buy or where they usually shop at the market.
This is my favourite part of any creative project. I’ve come up with an idea and a basic plan on how to make it happen…the only thing that can stop me now, is the myriad small details that have to be sorted and will inevitably suck all of the fun out of the project!
The pain of logistics
There is a great scene in the TV Show ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ where the Dad (Hal) notices that a light has blown in the kitchen, he goes to the cupboard to get a new lightglobe, but when takes the lightglobe off the shelf he realises that the shelf needs to be fixed, so goes to a drawer to get a screwdriver, but as he opens the drawer he hears a squeak as it opens and closes, so he goes to get some WD40 to fix the squeak, but then realises that the can of WD40 is empty, so hops in the car to get some more WD40 only to realise that the car is making a weird noise…so when his wife gets home and says ‘Can you fix the light in the kitchen?’ Hal yells from under the car “What does it look like I’m doing?!”
There was SO much of this in this project. Every seemingly simple idea, had a million resulting complications. For example, I wanted the people in the photos to be different, but I wanted the setting to be the same. So I couldn’t just wander around the market, I would need a dedicated spot, and in order to keep the light consistent over the whole day, I would need a space where I could set up a flash to replicate the same light for every shot. This seemed to be achievable by booking one of the unused stalls at the market, and up until about a month out from the shoot, this was the plan…until the Preston Market explained that they couldn’t promise me the space, as they had someone who was looking to move in, and so suddenly I was shooting the project at my house.
Taking 50 photos also seems pretty straight forward, until you start to factor in the time it will take to get people comfortable enough to let their guard down and give a glimpse of genuine happiness…at best I think this would take 10 minutes. But people rarely arrive bang on time, and you don’t want to just say ‘Thanks, NEXT!’ as soon as you’ve got their photo, you will have to do some form of conversation with the person who has just bared their sould to you…so let’s say you allocate 15 minutes per person. That’s 12.5 hours of photos, before you factor in food, or breaks, or people not arriving on time…that’s never going to work…you’ve got a basketball game to coach in the afternoon!!
Plus…seeing as I’m not at the market where I can just have people walk in…now I have to find 50 people, who are happy to have their photo taken for my stupid art project, and who are available at a very specific time on a particular day, and who I think I can cajole into a moment of genuine happiness…I don’t think I know 3 people who tick all of those boxes. For the first time in 5 years, I was regretting getting rid of Facebook.
At least I had all of the camera gear and lighting sorted!
*narrator’s voice: ‘He didn’t’
Oh right…well let’s talk about that in the next blog.
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