The Photographers Didn’t ​“Shoot”

Sarah Fritchey had my camera in her hand. But she didn’t ​“shoot” me.

She did click the shutter. And we ended up with the above photo, taken while I was checking out other collaborative photographs hanging in a Ninth Square exhibition that seeks alternatives to thinking of camera-wielders as ​“shooting” and ​“capturing” their ​“subjects.”

Fritchey is one of the curators of the exhibition, ​“Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography.” It is on display at Artspace’s main gallery at 50 Orange St. through Sept. 14.

The show is part of a traveling research project into the history of photography and the ever-evolving relationship between photographers and the photographed. The project was conceived of and produced by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler.

It includes iconic images like Dorothea Lange’s ​“Migrant Mother”, Steve McCurry’s ​“Afghan Girl,”, Nick Ut’s Vietnam War images, and Alberto Korda’s dorm-room-poster-ready Che Guevara, alongside quotations and stories about how each of those images affected the artist and the subject as the latter morphed from a person into a symbol.

The exhibition also features newly commissioned work by such local photographers as Daniel Eugene, Monique Atherton, Thana Faroq …

… and me. The long wall at the center of the gallery space is filled with four ​“collaborative photos” taken by me and subjects of stories I wrote while on assignment for the New Haven Independent. Under those photos are reproductions of the Independent articles in which those images originally appeared.

Fritchey asked me to contribute to the show not because I’m a trained photographer or an accomplished artist, which I’m not, but because my work as a staff reporter requires me to take hundreds of photographs every week: of local politicians and protesters, of landlords and tenants, of city officials and police officers and small business owners and whomever else I happen to be reporting on on any given day.

With the show’s central theme of photographic collaboration in mind, Fritchey asked me to hand my camera over to the subjects of my stories while out on assignment.

Ask them to photograph you or whatever else they’d like, she encouraged me, so that Independent readers get a chance to see what my reporting on the story looked like from the perspective of the story’s subject.

Photographs are not stationary, solitary objects, the exhibition posits, but rather complex negotiations between the person taking the picture and the person having their picture taken.

Sometimes that relationship is one of equals. Sometimes it tilts too far towards the cameraperson. But the outcome cannot exist without the participation of both.

By handing over my camera, however briefly, and then by publishing those collaborative photos in my articles on the website, I ceded a bit of my authorial control over the images in my story to the community I was writing about.

That seemed to fit the mission of community journalism, of working for a local news site that publishes story after story after story about the Elm City not from a distant, objectifying perspective, but from that of a dedicated, passionate member of the community.

Also, with my trepidation at the prospect of breaking the fourth wall while out on assignment rationalized away by my idealism about my mission as a community journalist, I embarked on a month’s worth of collaborative photo-taking. Fortunately, the idealism was vindicated.

The subjects of my stories were more than happy to snap a picture of me or their surroundings as I asked them questions about parking and politics and housing and airports.

In fact, they were eager to photograph. This was time for some payback. After all of the photos I have taken of them over the years, it was time to catch me in the frame.

At a June meeting of the city parking authority, when the commissioners had left and city transit chief Doug Hausladen and I were alone in the intensely blue-painted parking authority headquarters on George Street, Hausladen took my camera, stood, sat, and photographed me from about five different angles as I self-consciously asked him about the city’s recent acquisition of a new parking garage.

At a meeting of the Democratic Town Committee at the Betsy Ross Parish House on Kimberly Avenue, after the Democratic mayoral candidates made their elevator pitches to delegates in the run-up the convention, Town Chair Vinnie Mauro was a quick study on looking through the camera’s viewfinder, auto-focusing the lens, and then taking a picture of the exuberant post-meeting political chatter. State Sen. Gary Winfield, an accomplished photographer in his own right, also took the camera for a bit that night, though his photos didn’t make the final cut. Not because they weren’t expertly framed, but because they were of me. And there’s already too much of me in this exhibition.

At a City Plan Commission meeting later that month, Commissioner Leslie Radcliffe jumped at the opportunity to take a photo of me chowing down on a leftover sandwich after a six-hour meeting anchored by the approval of a rooming house for homeless youth. I had taken many a picture of her and her fellow commissioners mid-sandwich-bite during past coverage of the commission, and now it was her turn.

(In my discussions with Fritchey and exhibition designer Jack Adam, I was able to convince the two to include at least a few reader comments from each story underneath their reproductions in the gallery space. This impulse came not only from a desire to show the inherently collaborative section of the Independent that is the comment thread, but also to share one comment in particular posted by Three-Fifths underneath my City Plan Commission article.

He had heard that I am vegan, Three-Fifths wrote. Was that sandwich in my hand, and mouth, suitably free of animal products? I’m not vegan, just vegetarian, though my editor is vegan. Sorry Three-Fifths, I feel like I let you down.)

During a July recording of my WNHH radio show ​“Deep Focus,” local filmmaker Gorman Bechard snapped a picture of me behind the board in our recording studio after we talked about his and producer Bill Kraus’s new movie about the eccentric history of the old New Haven Clock Factory. This image didn’t make it into the final exhibition, for no other reason than that Fritchey, Adam and I wanted to prioritize my news stories rather than my arts stories.

Lastly, Robert Reed, the city’s chief lobbyist at the state legislature, took a minute out of the pre-press conference celebratory chatter at Tweed New Haven Airport after a recent federal court ruling in favor of the airport’s expansion to take a photo of me, sweaty and a bit bedraggled looking after a bike ride in the summer heat from downtown to Morris Cove.

Did participating in this collaborative photography experiment make me think differently about how I take photos? About how the people I cover have, and should have, some level of agency over the stories I write and the photos I take?

Yes and no.

Yes, in that working with Fritchey and Adam and Artspace and all of my photographic collaborators helped me focus on how I as a community reporter with a camera inevitably play just one small role in the larger project of sharing the stories of New Haven. Seeing my face in the articles I published reminded me, and hopefully our readers, that there is a human being on the other side of every article.

No, in that this is exactly what the community in community journalism is all about. I and, more importantly, the Independent are members of New Haven, not separate from it. This project was a helpful reminder for me, and hopefully our readers, that we are here to stay, enmeshed in the community we write about, telling the stories of New Haven as a part of the civic fabric of this city.

“Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography” will be on display at Artspace’s gallery at 50 Orange St. through Sept. 14. Click here to learn more about the exhibition.