Interviews as an editing tool
I recently worked as an editor on a photobook for a university assignment. The photographer, Tan, also a student, spoke English as his second language. The photobook aimed to depict the everyday life of a gay couple living in Melbourne; one of the couple, Alex, was from England and the other, Lucas, was from Malaysia. I won’t be using any images from the photoshoot, for reasons I’ll explain later on.
Tan was adamant that the photobook needed to be an intimate portrait that highlighted the domesticity and normality of the couple. While I appreciated the importance for Tan in representing the couple being in a healthy and loving relationship, I was concerned that the narrative of the photobook as a whole would not be compelling enough without more depth and detail. With more and more beautiful, yet ultimately thematically safe images of making beds, doing the dishes and going to the gym, I knew that the narration of these images would need to be compelling on their own to carry the story of this couple to a broader audience.
Initially, Tan and I decided to interview the couple together early on in the project, to have some good pull quotes for captions of the photographs. As someone who is quite experienced with interviewing people, I decided on a place that was quiet enough to record, but with enough background noise and mild distraction to put everyone at ease: a food court in the CBD. We chose our own curries, fish and sushi, and buckled ourselves in for a long chat about their family histories, work and their relationship.
The interview became far more useful than simply providing quotes. Once transcribed, the hour-long interview served as an important fact-checking document while I edited text within the photobook drafts. This stopped me from having to go back and query Tan and focus on more substantial grammatical and structural edits. It also gave me enough detail to guide a rewrite of the introduction to depict a more substantive description of the couple. Most importantly though, the conversation we had led us to the real crux of the couple’s relationship and why living in Melbourne together was so significant.
Both Lucas and Alex had grown up in small, homophobic places that were either intolerant of homosexuality or where sex between two men was illegal. Neither of them had completely come out to their families, which is why I’ve chosen not to use any of their images here. I don’t think I have a right to widen their digital footprint more than is totally necessary for the project.
After this conversation, my understanding of the narrative within this project strengthened and solidified. I was able to better understand why Tan wanted the project to revolve around their normal, domestic life, because, given the context, this normalcy was a huge triumph for them as a gay couple. I felt far more comfortable editing the book in the way Tan intended it visually, now with a more compelling narrative within the image captions.
Tan is a very strong and confident English speaker and prefers speaking Englihs to writing it, so this interview especially helped the early structural editing and drawing out the narrative of this project with Tan. While seemingly unconventional, I would consider conducting interviews during all early stages of the editing process for future projects.
One of the major drawbacks to conducting interviews is the inevitable and drawn out means of transcribing. Ninety minutes of conversation, no matter how interesting, can take many hours of studious transcription, and may take the wind out of an editor’s sails early on in the project. This is the last thing you want, given that the editor’s real work has barely even begun at this stage. If I was to do this again, I would put together a list of very directive questions for the first 30 minutes of the interview, then allow the conversation to wander after that. That way, at least I’d know I had the most important information early on, and the rest I could find and transcribe if necessary, later on.
My early interview of Tan, Alex and Lucas turned this project from quite an overwhelming task to a fulfilling and heart-warming pleasure. It taught me that being attentive to how people communicate best in a team and responding proactively to that can completely change the outcome of a project. In this case, something as simple as an interview over dinner made all the difference.
