photo prose: gary rabenko

Trying to tell a story

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Simcha photographers: Imagine the stories they could tell. The anxiety, sentimentality, tears, glamor, beauty, playfulness, excitement, poignancy — all should be found in a wedding album. Lineups with forced smiles posing to the camera don’t tell much of that. 

Thirty years ago photographers began to be ridiculed for their habit of interrupting to get a shot certain to show more faces. “Just look up a moment!” they would prompt before a speech, a dance, and many key moments. We bristled then at those professionals. Was that the best way to tell the real story? And so the photojournalistic movement was embraced.

Maybe the real story was how folks related to each other, not how they related to the camera! Perhaps the photographer who worked hard to get a shot of parents qvelling, told more of the story than the pro with the direct attempt which at best gets the predicted cheese smiles, and worse, actually distracts from the moment. But doing that is certainly not easy if everyone is expecting, hoping, and dying to pose to the camera! 

The concept of photojournalism confuses client and photographer today. If photojournalism is the art of great snapshots then that is an oxymoron because snapshots are devoid of skill. The word snapshot connotes the image maker’s lack of technical control — but the image still requires composition, light and expression to be powerful. Those claiming to be photojournalists are often merely professional unskilled snap-shooters, riding a wave of photojournalistic popularity.

Ironically because we think of photojournalism as snap shooting with no science behind it, we assume photojournalists must possess special talents that transcend technical expertise. This perpetuates the unskilled! Today skilled photographers are often undermined by people who try so hard to look just the way they would in their selfie;hey stop doing what they were doing to tell you that they are posing for a picture and that they have clean white teeth.

A dynamic speaker addresses an audience in a way that you would long remember, had you experienced it. When the photographer tries to go beyond a bland or awkward expression, people feel compelled to pose to the camera.

What can the photographer do?

If he tries to ignore them it seems he is unobservant. If he acknowledges but is slow to accommodate, this is interpreted as rude, impudent, or irritating. If he humors them and makes a photo, it leads to more and more requests for those “interrupt the simcha to take a picture shots,” and you know some will actually ask to see the photo — which is a whole other story!   

Back to your wedding album: Do many of the photos tell the wedding story, or do they say how here we paused the story to pose for a picture?

Gary Rabenko is artistic and technical director of Rabenko Photography and Video Arts  516-593-9760, gary@rabenko.com