How do you tell a story using the details in photographs? How do you get across a sense of feeling and atmosphere?
Staff photographer Silvia Razgova spent a few days with the Monte Carlo Circus last month, and as well as producing the photographs printed in the news pages of The National, she was asked to complete a special assignment - to show, through her pictures, how it 'felt' to be at the circus.
Here she tells photo editor RJ Mickleson how she tackled the shoot.
RJ: The circus has been photographed by a number of photographers over the years. How did you stay away from some of the stereotypical circus shots and offer a fresh look into the circus world?
SR: At first I didn’t think about it at all. I tried to shoot what I found interesting. Then when I realised there was going to be a news story, it posed more of a challenge for me because I needed to show specific elements. And I then found that it was more challenging to photograph the circus than I thought. The lighting changes very rapidly - the intensity and the direction. And the people are moving very fast and at the same time it’s very dark. If you just look at it technically, it’s a challenge just to keep the images sharp.
I actually went online to Magnum and Getty to see what people had already done and to see what’s considered a ‘newsworthy image’ from the circus. I thought ‘Oh, i could have got this’ or ‘I could have got that’, only to find out later that I couldn't because my circus was different. So I didn't try to be too different (from what I saw online), I only tried to convey what I felt and thought about it.
Can you describe what you are thinking when you bounce between an editorially focused image and a more abstract image? Is it a conscious effort on your part or are you just shooting what you see?
With this circus story, I was conscious of what I was photographing because I needed to decide what was more important to the news story and what was of interest for the blog essay. It is always a conscious effort, I rarely just 'snap'. Then while I was making decisions as to what to photograph I knew that this was going to be for the newspaper or this is going to be for the project. For the newspaper, the image had to contain a certain amount of information and for the essay I was going more for what felt right - it was intuitive and emotional. What was important to me was what the moment felt like.
A lot of your personal work is very intimate. Can you explain how you illustrate intimacy and abstraction in your work?
With some images it's in the framing. There's an image in this essay of one man resting on another man's feet. I don't need to see their full bodies, I don't need to see the space where this moment is happening. What they are doing is a lot about trust, their physical contact and their intimacy. All I need to see is that point of contact, how he's gripping his legs. I explored that scene for while and I tried to get their eyes in the picture, then I decided I didn't need to see the eyes, eyes are overrated. People always want to see the white of the eyes and in journalistic or news images then yes, it would be more compelling to see another person's emotions, to create contact with their eyes. In other images however I don't think you need them, in fact I quite like portraits with closed eyes.
In speaking about eyes, or lack thereof, there’s a number of photos in this collection that don't include faces, or if they do, the viewer doesn't see any other features (hands etc). Are you aggressively pursuing these tight details and textures?
To know what it feels like to be at the circus, you don't need to see the faces. The way a snake charmer lets a snake crawl over her is way more interesting than seeing her painted face. Again, it's textural, there is this cool, smooth, mass of a muscular snake wrapped on her warm hair with a hard, metal hair-pin keeping the whole thing up. I find these different textures far more interesting.
I sometimes use people and objects in the frame as compositional elements... they all to come together to balance each other out or to work together, or just to be pretty in the frame. I think it’s fine to make pretty pictures. I don't need to be conveying people's innermost secrets with every picture. I find beauty in sheer objects and the way they come together, and the way they are revealed by light like the Lion's Skin photo. I watched him panting a bit, I wish I could’ve conveyed that better, but as he sat back his skin wrinkled against the cold cage and it reveals the mass of his whole body. The texture reveals what's beyond the photo in some of these cases. We know what a lion's face looks like so I look for other elements to tell us more about the subject's experience or its relationship to the environment.
Where in the process does the abstract come in? In the shooting (or not shooting) of certain images or in the editing process?
Both, but first you have to have the images to edit, so it was a conscious decision to shoot it this way. Then later, you can look at the images from the 3 days and put together several different edits based on what you needed.
My editors and I ended up putting together a couple of different edits, including this blog essay, and another that was more straight forward. The latter spoke to more of a general audience who may have seen, or would like to see, the circus. It said ‘this is what you’d see if you were there’.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe they'd see the details and the abstractions that I saw.