Land's End: An Interview with Christopher Grabowski

Geist web edi­tor Josh Wallaert sat down for cof­fee with doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy Christopher Grabowski to talk about Grabowski’s photo essay “Land’s End,” pub­lished in Geist 73.

Josh Wallaert: Tell me about your meth­ods. When you arrive some­where new — Alert Bay, for exam­ple — how do you go about enter­ing the story of a place?

Christopher Grabowski: Alert Bay is one of those places where you can’t just step out of the car, or the boat in this case, and start ask­ing peo­ple ques­tions. You have to know how to ask the right peo­ple in the right order, mak­ing your­self known to peo­ple first. The same applies to places like Jabal Saraj in Afghanistan, and to many social groups here in Vancouver. You have to fig­ure out the order. That’s the dif­fer­ence between a spot news pho­tog­ra­pher and a doc­u­men­tar­ian. The first one comes when things blow up, and he pho­tographs them; it’s about direct impact. When a doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­pher comes later to do the after-bombing story, that’s a dif­fer­ent way of approach­ing the sit­u­a­tion; it’s about how the com­mu­nity adapts. 

You don’t start pho­tograph­ing right away, of course. I’ve been to Alert Bay prob­a­bly seven times. On my third visit, per­haps, peo­ple started treat­ing me seri­ously, not as a tourist but as some­body who comes and goes and has some sort of long-term inter­est in the place. Now you’re this guy who comes from time to time and takes pic­tures. You’re part of the story in a way. What pho­tog­ra­phy does as a medium, and it’s invalu­able, is that it’s really about doc­u­ment­ing the photographer’s own rela­tion with the sub­ject. That rela­tion is always in the pic­ture, but it’s not always apparent. 

JW: You’re a writer as well as a pho­tog­ra­pher. Which comes first in your process? 

CG: I learned English in my late twen­ties, so as much as I enjoy writ­ing, it’s a much harder part of the job. But this is an impor­tant point. I would like to dwell on this a lit­tle bit. Generally, the way pho­tog­ra­phy is used in the news media, the story is writ­ten first, and the pho­tog­ra­pher is brought in later to make it more real­is­tic. That process is affected by the “relent­less melt­ing of time,” as Susan Sontag would say. When the pho­tog­ra­pher is sent to illus­trate a story after the writer has done his part, you might have peo­ple in the pho­to­graph at dif­fer­ent moment in their lives, at dif­fer­ent places, some­times dif­fer­ent peo­ple entirely. It’s just the issue that is sup­posed to be illus­trated. In the main­stream media world, the edi­to­r­ial side has too much con­trol over the process of pro­duc­ing that pic­ture. The char­ac­ter and thrust of the story is already deter­mined, and they’re just look­ing for a pho­to­graph to illus­trate it. I’ve done it a mil­lion times myself. I don’t bitch about it. That’s the nature of the beast. But as a doc­u­men­tar­ian I want a lit­tle more lee­way. Usually I take pic­tures first, and then I have to write the story in a way that accom­mo­dates those par­tic­u­lar images. 

I think that’s the right way of doing things, because pho­tog­ra­phy is a dif­fer­ent reflec­tion of real­ity than the text. People have polit­i­cal opin­ions and ideas, and some­times they are unable to see things, but the cam­era does see them and allows us a rare occa­sion to spend some time with that real­ity, because it’s now frozen in front of us. If our news sto­ries relied more on pho­tog­ra­phy for con­tent and mean­ing, and if writ­ers would have to go and describe what’s in those pic­tures, we would prob­a­bly have more hon­est, true reporting.

JW: It seems like the prob­lem is writ­ers fix­ing the mean­ing of a story too early. As you’re tak­ing pic­tures, is there a point when you say to your­self, “Okay, now I have this. Now I under­stand this story”?

CG: No, it’s really a process. It has to be open ended. I sur­prise myself some­times because I inter­view peo­ple and just keep lis­ten­ing, and I end up with half a note­book full of notes. And then, just as an exam­ple, I show the story to [Geist pub­lisher] Stephen [Osborne] and he says, You know, it would be bet­ter if it had more of this and that and that, and then I go back to my note­book, and I see, Oh, it’s there. And then I will write that. But that’s hardly pos­si­ble for a reporter work­ing on a dead­line. It’s fixed, bang, goes to the news­pa­per, and that becomes our point of view. Documentary is really a process of dis­cov­ery and you can’t end arbi­trar­ily at any given point.

JW: As you’ve returned to these West Coast fron­tier towns over the years, what kinds of changes have you seen?

CG: In some com­mu­ni­ties, there is sort of a diminu­tion. Like over these last ten years, Port Hardy, I think they lost one third of the pop­u­la­tion. They lost sev­eral shops, restau­rants. The whole fish­ing busi­ness is gone. The mine is closed. So it’s shrink­ing, and you can feel that. And some other com­mu­ni­ties, like Alert Bay, they just go on. They’ve been in some sort of cri­sis for the last cen­tury, so they don’t really think it’s any dif­fer­ent. Maybe there is some­thing in their hunting-gathering past that allows them to be more flex­i­ble than other North American folks who just trans­plant typ­i­cal expec­ta­tions to any place that they go — so Port Hardy has its own sub­urbs, its own west side and its own east side, sort of a minia­ture typ­i­cal North American city. They try to live their lives in an expected sort of man­ner. But it can only be sus­tained to a cer­tain point, as long as the mine is open, and then it col­lapses. It doesn’t mean that a com­fort­able life there is impos­si­ble. It’s just not sus­tain­able this way.

JW: Is there some­thing unique about pho­tog­ra­phy that lets you approach these issues dif­fer­ently than, say, a pro­fes­sional his­to­rian or a news journalist?

CG: The pho­to­graphic image works with the human mind on many lev­els. The first thing is — it’s an index­i­cal reflec­tion of what’s in front of the lens. So that gives it a sort of embed­ded cred­i­bil­ity. But then most of the time we don’t really know what’s in the pic­ture with­out know­ing a con­text, so you have the whole pack­age, which includes your cul­ture, the mil­lions of pho­tographs you’ve already seen, and so on. So the purely doc­u­men­tary, index­i­cal reflec­tion is one thing pho­tog­ra­phy does, but it does not really deter­mine the photograph’s social mean­ing. What hap­pens with some pho­tographs, like sev­eral pho­tographs from the Vietnam War era — you remem­ber Nick Ut’s pic­ture of the kids run­ning, being burned by napalm — that sort of pho­to­graph allows peo­ple to focus their emo­tions and weight the pho­to­graph with a mean­ing that is not nec­es­sar­ily there or wouldn’t be under­stood the same way in some other soci­eties. American soci­ety at that point was really look­ing for a focal point for their anger and frus­tra­tion with that war, so the pho­to­graph acquired so much mean­ing, but that was sort of a con­tent pro­jected on the pho­to­graph. Photography allows this in a more direct way and bru­tal way than text. 

JW: I’m look­ing at your photo of the for­mer Ocean Falls high school library, now over­taken by mosses and small trees. It reminds me of Camilo José Vergara, who has pho­tographed the ruins of American indus­trial cities from a soci­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tive. What is the rela­tion­ship between pho­tog­ra­phy and pol­i­tics in your work? Do you want your work to con­tribute to con­ver­sa­tions about Canada and its future?

CG: Yes, that’s a very impor­tant ques­tion. Vergara is a great pho­tog­ra­pher. He sort of noticed things in American civ­i­liza­tion, let’s speak broadly, that were hid­den in plain view. And he brought together a body of work that was look­ing at these issues in a way that sur­passed the con­sen­sual, habit­ual way of look­ing at economies and cities. And that’s an absolutely great doc­u­men­tary work. Very sim­i­lar in terms of impact is Ed Burtynsky, his project Manufactured Landscapes, or his book on China, basi­cally show­ing what our civ­i­liza­tion is really based upon, the extrac­tion of resources, and what this does to us and to the planet. He found a visual lan­guage to present that issue, bypass­ing the econ­omy vs. preser­va­tion con­tro­versy, and bring it to people’s atten­tion from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Fantastic work, and very important. 

I don’t want to put myself together with these giants, but my work is in a way about try­ing to show the rela­tion between the dom­i­nant econ­omy and the com­mu­ni­ties that actu­ally make this econ­omy pos­si­ble through resource extrac­tion, the fron­tier com­mu­ni­ties. And they can be any­where, in Sierra Leone, dig­ging up dia­monds, or in North America, cut­ting trees or min­ing nickel or some­thing. There is an uneasy rela­tion­ship between this econ­omy and the com­mu­ni­ties that make it pos­si­ble, which are really con­sid­ered expend­able. The wealth is trans­ported some­where else, to some sort of cen­ter, how­ever we define that. It’s tragic, actu­ally, the ten­sion between econ­omy and com­mu­nity, whole towns bought and sold and bull­dozed or aban­doned. I don’t claim I ever suc­ceed to the degree let’s say Burtynsky suc­ceeded in tight­en­ing up his mes­sage or pre­sent­ing his vision, but it’s still in the works. It’s a project in progress, so I still have a chance.

See more of Christopher Grabowski’s work at geist.com/author/grabowski-christopher and his home page, mediumlight.com.