Newsletter - From an NPR story, following Lola, age 12...

Hi all,

*Trigger warning, this story does include a terminally ill child.*

I just saw this story on NPR the other day.

It's an incredibly moving project, but also extremely sad.

Photographer Moriah Ratner started photographing terminally ill Lola, and then followed her and her family until after her death. 

At one point Ratner's friends became concerned with her mental health while she was doing this story, it had consumed her. Doing a personal project on someone, especially someone in dire circumstances, can take a toll on our mental wellbeing. Despite being observational storytellers we still have a responsibility to our human nature, and turning off our emotions during a long-term project, well, I doubt it's even possible. 

Documentary photography carries some responsibility with it, some sense of objectivity on behalf of the viewer, but we are humans first and photographers second, so feeling the weight of a story will also affect our photographs. In my opinion this is perfectly ok. There is power in feeling, and photographs captured with emotion on both the part of the subject and the photographer will translate to the viewer. Of course there is the discussion wether we, as documentary photographers, should be allowed to project our emotions in our documentary work, but in some way we do that through how we present our photographs anyway, so I feel like this point is a bit mute. 

It's hard to say, and definitely a discussion that will never stop moving.

But for the purposes of this newsletter, let's just say we can go ahead and have emotions. It's healthy, and can be quite powerful in our photography.

True objectivity, is there even such a thing?

All for now,

Kristine