Behind the popular coffee shops, crowded sidewalks, and entertainment of bustling 9th Street in Columbia, Missouri, lives a family stuck in the shadows of society.

Over the past three years, Sheena Marie Andrews has overcome drug addictions and struggled with emotional depression while living on the streets. She was kicked out of her father’s house at 17 for her drug use and turned to her street family, which offered money, alcohol, tobacco, and companionship for the high school dropout.

At 20, Sheena is one of the youngest women sleeping in the alleys of downtown Columbia. She has quickly grown tired of the city, but not the lifestyle, and is looking for a way to escape before her next court date. Sheena struggles to come to grips with reality, but confusion over love, family, and identity has clouded her future.

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In The Fray Contributor

On our first date I was 15 and he was 17. We were high school sweethearts and, after 11 years, we married. During our teens and 20s, when most of our friends were experimenting with casual romances, we seemed too intertwined, too interdependent, and too stable. Instead of moving from person to person, we moved from place to place to find our own way to experiment with the world. We moved from our college campus to his law school town in Indiana; Chicago; Florence, Italy; back to Chicago; and then to Brooklyn.

It was in Italy, in 2002, that I conceived this project from a series of black and white photographs taken of my husband shortly after we moved there. We rented a furnished apartment on Via dei Pepi from a couple who were strangers to us. They left their personal items, including their photographs, diaries, love letters, music, dried red roses, mismatched dishes, a Kama Sutra book, and the bed they shared. Through their suggestion of daily rituals and interaction, the objects left in the apartment invited me to imagine the private interiors of the couple’s relationship. By sifting through the possessions of these strangers a story of intimacy unfolded, except this story was not made on a Hollywood set but had taken place in my own home.

Influenced by the images of my relationship on the backdrop of the artifacts left behind by the Italian couple’s romance, my photographic project evolved into an exploration of the architecture of love. I used my apartment as a set, painting walls, arranging spaces, and directing my husband as the main character of an everyday love story. The plot of this story was based on the “couples dance,” which is a term psychologists use to describe couples’ negotiations seeking closeness until it becomes smothering and eliciting distance until it feels too far. Rather than documenting our life as it happened, I referenced memories, observations of other real couples and impressions learned from media-based relationship prototypes. By sourcing these external representations, I aimed to merge our specific reality with an archetypal fictional shell painted in vibrant color.

Upon viewing the photographs I made, I realized in addition to creating a story about the couples dance, the photographic process was part of my couples dance. In my own relationship closeness was always easy but seeing our independence was sometimes a challenge. Becoming so close at such a young age — we grew up together — our influence on each other was immense, resulting in heightened confusion for me about where my individual identity ended and his began.

Behind the camera, I took control over my husband; I used him as a model. Our photographing sessions created a scenario in which I reserved power to project my own ideas onto him — to make him whatever I wanted him to be. In the pictures, I barely recognize his persona; the exertion of my control diminished his individuality. Viewing his image transformed and suspended in the photographs fostered a distance, an alternate perspective from which to understand him and his relation to me. I identified with the cycle of closeness and distance portrayed in the images, as he retreats and comes forward, and saw the parallel to our real life. In contrasting the image of him I created on film to his real life character, the interplay between our detached and connected identities resonated. I saw that while I could influence him (as I did posing him for the pictures) and he could influence me, that committing to a relationship does not encroach the ability to act as self-determined individuals making choices to dominate, recede, and compromise.

All images were made in Brooklyn, New York using a medium format camera.

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A REVIEW: The art of photographing the young and in love

In The Fray Contributor

Editor’s Note: The author is Margot Herster’s step-mother-in-law and friend.
    
For the millions of adults in their 20s reared by baby boomer parents determined to instill in their children self-esteem fueled by fulfillment and encouraging entitlement, questions arise when personal objectives meet up with love. Margot Herster examines issues facing her generation:

Can two young adults pursue separate lives driven by individual interests and goals and also create a life as a couple? Where does the individual life end and the couple’s life begin?  Is sacrifice inherent in a relationship to survive? How quickly must adulthood be reached and to what extent can an individual control the quality of life if it is designated to begin at a specific age instead of at a point of readiness?

In Margot Herster’s poignant photographs, she reveals the loneliness of struggling with these issues even as an intimate relationship progresses. Does loving someone ease assimilation into adulthood or make one more vulnerable to the trappings created by expectations?

The isolation of an emergent self poised slightly apart from the elements of daily life is demonstrated by photographs of physical intimacy against the backdrop of unpacked boxes, randomly strewn personal items in an otherwise unadorned urban apartment, wall hangings propped on the floor, a television turned on in a room facing an uninhabited couch, and the constant pressure of time passing as internal conflicts remain unresolved.  

The courage to admit such a dilemma exists — between pursuing a relationship and allowing one’s ego free reign — is riveting in its naked honesty. In spite of the camera lens’s brilliant focus, the beguiling composition invites interpretation. Herster’s color palette illuminates her photos’ content and creates an optimistic layer over darker themes. Our eyes search each shot to find plausible hope for romance to win over self, or in the very least to hold its own. It is Herster’s expertly measured degree of hope for a dual victory that her work entices us for second, third, and multiple more searches.

Herster also manifests the hesitant interaction in a relationship: a fragment of a woman’s head barely visible in a mirror’s glass is in the foreground as a man leans his half-toweled body against a wall constructed so narrowly that the confinement it creates elicits an involuntary intake air. This keen photograph illustrates the elusive component inherent in the transition from a solitary life to a fully disclosed committed relationship. We are voyeurs snatching glimpses of this couple as they engage, retreat, and attempt tentative steps towards a life of their making. Will this life be worth the effort?    

Another photograph places the man in the relationship outside the apartment. We see him through the window as he sits on the fire escape. Smoke in hand, he stares where we cannot see. The light from inside the apartment casts a shadow across his profile suggesting that physical escape does not provide relief from the emotional conflict of relationships, growth, and meeting adult expectations. We are suspended with him as the answers he seeks remain out of view.  

The artist and her model

I met them, Margot Herster and her model, several years ago. My first impressions have not changed. They are people with stories — ones I want to know.

She hadn’t yet spoken before I drew a conclusion about her. Her presence alone commanded that she not be categorized. I knew from the static in the air created by her entrance that getting acquainted with her would be time consuming. She possesses this level of control. But like a benevolent ruler protecting her subjects, she carries herself without offense, aware of her obligation to not give more information than a situation calls for. Not until the time is right. I liked her immediately.

He is as striking as she is, but he is less guarded.  His charismatic face hints at the substance of life — love, compassion, strength, pain, curiosity, and questions, always questions, and suitable, if not in quantity at least in quality, answers. He charms and entertains without guile. His duty is to bring smiles — some joyful, others thoughtful — and he is a master at it.

Most of all, I took notice — how could one not — that when the two of them are in close proximity, he frames her with an arm, a look, a word. Is it his essence that produces this effect or hers? Does she procure it, or does he offer it up as the standard for their relationship?

He is the model; she is the artist. There is a private contract between them. But in her work you can see it. The viewer is aware of the give-and-take between them that keeps their personal and professional relationships dynamic from the constant shift in power; first one, then the other, taking the lead.  

However, the nuances of their covenant remain a mystery for future discussion. I have questioned each of them attempting to delve into these enigmatic regions, but intuition tells me their reticence to expose more now is to keep the relationship incubating. When they are ready, and the time is right, they will reveal their new insights through art. I will be waiting.

In The Fray Contributor

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The Akha society in Northern Thailand is in rapid transition, despite the good work of NGOs such as the Akha Heritage Foundation and DAPA. As electricity comes to each village in turn, its inhabitants begin to realize the homogenized and idealized life portrayed on satellite television. The young often choose to leave the simple village life behind, in search of work and the other lures of city life. At the present time, women, particularly the old, still wear traditional headdresses, but men and children no longer dress as their elders did even a decade ago, instead choosing the same practical, non-descript t-shirts and pants found anywhere in the world. I sought to document the traditional customs of the Akha Hill Tribe people, an ethnic minority who are losing their cultural identity.

Thailand was photographed in 2004, as part of an ongoing multi-year project. In 1998, I documented ethnic minority groups in Tibet and Southern China, and in 2000, I traveled to Bolivia to photograph the Aymara. I believe that it is of significant importance to document the traditions of indigenous cultures that are rapidly fading throughout the world. As a documentary photographer, it is my goal to document such traditions before they disappear, and it is my hope that viewers may consider assisting in their preservation.

Part 1: China

Part 2: Bolivia

For information on obtaining prints from the Vanishing Heritage series, please contact John Kaplan at kaplan-at-writeme-dot-com.

In The Fray Contributor

Many magazines, InTheFray included, call their photographers, writers, and editors “contributors.” This was John Kaplan’s description when InTheFray published “Life after torture,” his photographic essay about victims of torture, last year. However, the word “contributor” extends beyond this one-time event to characterize what has driven Kaplan’s efforts over the past few decades.

“It comes from a psychological need to give something back,” Kaplan reflected. “I’ve gotten a lot of help along the way.” The 1989 Photographer of the Year began making pictures in his teens. “A group of extremely talented, yet giving people, were my mentors at a young age,” Kaplan said of the staff on his hometown newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware. Three of these photographers went on to work for National Geographic; two were awarded Photographer of the Year.  

He felt very lucky. “As I became successful in my career, I felt a real need to give something back, to give people a leg up on their own path,” said Kaplan. “It’s been an evolution for me.”

After graduating from Ohio University in 1982, Kaplan spent the next decade photographing, designing, and editing for newspapers. In 1990, he founded a journalism consulting firm called Media Alliance. “Basically that was an outgrowth of wanting to contribute to the profession,” he said. “The goal … wasn’t focused on the business itself. It was focused on the education.” Kaplan shared his design, editorial, and staff development expertise with newspapers throughout New England, the South, the Midwest, and Canada.

This venture led to his becoming a fulltime educator. After first teaching for the Syracuse University London Centre in 1993, and leading countless workshops and seminars, Kaplan, who wanted to become a professor, returned to his alma mater for graduate studies in the late 1990s. Now a faculty member of the University of Florida, he was named the College of Journalism and Communications Teacher of the Year in 2002 and, in 2005, the International Educator of the Year. Just three years before, the Academy of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication voted him second place in the AEJMC Promising Professors Competition.

In 2003, Kaplan developed a third way to help other journalists: through writing. He noted that university and workshop students asked the same sorts of questions over and over: “What are top editors and photo buyers looking for?” The need for a book emerged. No one had written a book about compiling a portfolio since 1984. Kaplan’s Photo Portfolio Success addresses a variety of photographic genres and media of presentation.  Courses in several academic programs, such as the photojournalism sequence at the University of Missouri, use his book.

Through his teaching, Kaplan became involved with photographing torture victims. Among his workshop participants was a doctor who had treated these individuals. Kaplan contacted the Center for Victims of Torture, with whom his student had been involved, to discuss the possibilities of a photographic essay. “My idea was just basically to give a voice to the voiceless,” he said. “Torture was absolutely an under-reported issue when I approached it.”

Kaplan became one of the first journalists to go to new refugee camps constructed by the United Nations in Guinea after guerrilla war spilled over the border from Sierra Leone. Between 1991 and 2002, 50,000 people perished in a civil war in impoverished Sierra Leone, a country where a woman can anticipate living 42 years and a man 39. According to the BBC, a signature mark of one side was to chop off the hands of their enemies.

Kaplan’s plan for his two-week trip was to make a portrait of each victim, and record first-person accounts of what each had witnessed and endured. After introducing his project to various NGOs and other groups assisting the refugees, he had only six remaining days to photograph and interview. During that time he commuted four hours to and from the town where he stayed to get to the camps. By the time he was done, he had photographed 20 to 25 people. “I could have easily photographed a hundred if I [had] wished,” he said.

Reporting the darkness in human existence exacts an emotional toll upon journalists. Knowing this, Kaplan devised a plan to process his feelings. “I spent some quiet time alone every evening to really think deeply about what I’d witnessed, who I’d met,” he said. “I try not to distance myself emotionally.” When in difficult situations, journalists, like emergency and medical workers, focus upon the task at hand. There is a delicate balance of permitting feelings to guide, but not overwhelm, reporting. “While you’re photographing and while you’re interviewing, you do need a certain type of distance that allows you to concentrate, not to cry for example, and to maintain a sense of objectivity,” he said. “In my case, I do not believe in absolute objectivity, but I do believe in fairness. The best way to put it is you’ve got to keep your shit together while you’re working.”

Rewards for his efforts came in different ways. Kaplan had hoped that his documentation would be used to bring about justice for the torture victims, so he did not hesitate when the UN asked to use his work in the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Surviving Torture has been shown in Asia as well as published (as Life after torture) in InTheFray. Visitors to the Visa Pour L’image festival in Perpignan, France, were the first to experience the multimedia version.

Acclaim poured in from colleagues. In 2003, the project received the Overseas Press Club Award for Feature Photography and the Harry Chapin Media Award for Photojournalism, as well as citation by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation. Survivors of Torture also placed in the National Headliner Awards, Best of Photojournalism Competition, Pictures of the Year International, Society of News Design, and the Photo District News Best of Photography Contest.

Observing that much renowned photojournalism executed in the past century focuses upon despair at some level, Kaplan recommends that photographers enlarge their vision. “I think the bigger issues need to be looked at,” he conveyed, noting that his two experiences judging the Pulitzer Prize helped him form this view. This is exemplified by one of Kaplan’s ongoing projects — documenting disappearing cultures around the world. (InTheFray published the three-part Vanishing heritage essay in its October, November, and December 2005 issues).

The use of torture is growing around the world, according to Amnesty International, Kaplan says. “What’s interesting to me about this topic is that at the time I pursued this a few years ago, torture was seen as completely apolitical. For example, if you asked members of Congress on either side of the political spectrum, you got a universal response of outrage against its use.”

“I believe that any rationalization of the use of torture in the greater war against terrorism is misguided to say the least, and stoops to the level of barbarism,” Kaplan adds. “It’s very shocking to see that in our culture we’re having a national discussion about its perceived use.”

In The Fray Contributor

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I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years examining how my upbringing has shaped me into the person I am today. Like most people, I know that my family and friends played an integral role in my development, but only recently did I realize, and accept, the extent that my parents influenced my core self. I can trace my relationships, my career choice, and my fundamental beliefs directly back to my mother and father and the way they lived.

I wanted to explore this personal realization further and find out how it applies to a growing social demographic in this country. Same-sex couples have been raising children for decades, but this family dynamic has been thrust to the forefront of our culture in the last few years.

When I began my relationship with the Huddlestonsmith family, it only took a few visits to conclude this family was no different from any other family I had met in Midwestern America. They welcomed me in, insisted I join them at the dinner table, and shared their home with me in every way. But as familiar as this household was to me, I often heard about the discrimination David Huddlestonsmith, his partner, Dave, and David’s 11-year-old daughter, Katie, experienced living as a same-sex family. This was something very foreign to me.

I wanted to understand what it was like to live in the shadow of discrimination. More importantly though, I wanted to find out what effect this discrimination had on Katie, a child feeling the societal response to her father and his partner’s lifestyle.  

I quickly found out Katie had adapted her life as a result of her unique upbringing.  David, Dave, and Katie had very open relationships, sharing all aspects of each other’s lives with one another. Katie, however, was much less open with people outside of her family. Aside from her teachers, a few friends, and their parents, she didn’t volunteer information about her gay father and his partner. She once said, “I know at least five boys [at school] that would tease me if they knew.”

I worked on the project, off and on, for about a month and a half. In that time, I saw the love the Huddlestonsmith family expresses. I saw the struggles David dealt with living as a gay man. And I saw Katie’s success in the classroom, and the admiration she has for her father and his partner. But I only scratched the surface. Katie’s development will evolve as our society does, and her future is dependent on our cultural willingness to accept her as a child of a same-sex couple.

In The Fray Contributor

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The Chinese word Tao means path or way, or street. This idea is the root of the Taoist religion. While most places in China aren’t that religious these days, life here is filled with streets, and the streets with life.

The way can be difficult to navigate. I live in a small mountain city called Wanzhou, which is on the banks of the Yangtze River, in the Sichuan region of western China. The river and the mountains combine to prevent any street from being straight. I spent months getting lost whenever I strayed from the main roads. There are stairs everywhere, making each walk an exercise in three-dimensional thinking.

In all these wanderings I have yet to find a street that’s been far from the click of mahjong tiles. Mahjong is a tile-laying game that occupies almost everyone’s free time. And free time is in great supply. The streets are loaded with small shops and all of them have more  employees than it seems they could possibly need. Unless they are needed precisely to defeat neighbouring shop employees at the game. Players at green-topped game tables congregate in parks and alleys and spectators gather. But it’s not just mahjong on which people spend their time. Cards use less expensive equipment and can be played with a stool and lots of shouting. People talk about Sichuan people having fiery tempers to go with the spicy food they eat. Big — yet good-natured — screaming matches often ensue.

There are more sedate pastimes. Old people sit and watch kids running by or meander through parks. The gentle clicking of metal spheres being slowly rotated in hands often accompanies these walks. I’ve been told that rotating these spheres is a way to maintain longevity. Another common technique is walking backwards in circles. Many of those old pedestrians seem as aimless as me. They’re just walking to see what there is to see, especially the ones walking backwards.

In Wanzhou sunny days are rare. But when they do occur, the kite flyers come out. Carefully spaced old men, tethered to their contraptions far above, line the banks of the Yangtze. These are the kinds of kites on which I can imagine trying to send a person into space. Those sunny days also turn into impromptu flag ceremonies when people can actually expect their clothes to get dry.

While Wanzhou is a small city, it is technically part of Chongqing, a huge metropolis a couple of hundred kilometers upriver. Chongqing is known for its spicy food. I’m assailed with more than the jingles of fast food restaurants when I travel through the city. Independent vendors attack your sense of smell directly as they fry up noodles or potatoes or anything you can put on a stick. The spiciness that wafts from tubs of takeout causes your mouth to water as beautiful girls try to find places to sit and eat. Or at least I tell myself it’s the peppers. Then the burning coal they use to cook on the street, where there are no gas lines or electricity, always give me coughing fits, and the girls are out of sight by the time I recover.

I also coughed in the mountains, where people burn yak dung in fireplaces and incense in offering pyres. The idea of a path takes on even more significance in Lhasa as Tibetan pilgrims circumambulate temples, prostrating themselves all the while. On the ground around the Jokhang Temple the rasping of the pads that protect the pilgrims’ hands and knees sliding over rocky tiles is omnipresent. But you can get away from all of that; get above it all with monks who’re listening to the rituals happening below.

Then it’s time to find the way home. Even though my apartment is away from the noise of the street, all that stuff is waiting just outside. The paths are filled with life.

In The Fray Contributor