Today is 23nd September 2008.
I would like to share one of the most important picture and experience of my life.
Me and Mary Ellen Mark.
I attend Mary Ellen Mark’s workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006.
That was a point in my life where I started to question how I should be improving my photography. Very quickly I concluded that getting a better camera was surely not the way to go. Workshops and reviews of my work was the way and still is today.
I took a big jump to attend Mary Ellen’s workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico. This was indeed one of the craziest thing I ever did and the best thing to add was that there was absolutely no regrets. I was the only student that flew in from so far. The rest of the students were either from Mexico or New York. On top of this, I could not speak a single word of Spanish.:c
Conversing with anyone (except for fellow students) was a horrible time. I also had food poisoning during the course and that surely did not help. As I came from so far and spent so much, I was extremely hungry to learn.
But I should most talk about irony here.
Mary Ellen did not show me how to shoot better, say should I have shot from a different angle or shoot with a wider lens or use flash or anything close to that. All I ever did learn and felt was the love she has for her subjects and that indeed shows in her pictures.
Let me cite two example: many years back, she did a photo project on a family who lived in a car. There was a dad, a mum, a daughter and a son. Now the son has grown up and got into trouble with the law. All I hear was how Mary Ellen was trying to talk to the lawyer and helping him get out of prison.
There was this other example of this girl called Tiny whom Mary Ellen made a picture of in 1983. Tiny was only 14 years old then. And what happens after was that Mary Ellen continues to photograph her and now Tiny is now a single mother with five children by five different fathers.
Mary Ellen does have that genuine interest in people’s life. This is the page of Mary Ellen’s book which I took back from Mexico to Singapore.
I told myself that I would most like to maintain this special relationship with my subjects. I know photography is not a cancer curing drug that could change the world but it could mean so much to the person I am photographing as well as people close to the subject.
Photography is such a powerful tool. It can take away so much in an instant and yet give back so much more.
