“Working Men, Working Boats”| Milton Moore
“Whether you’re exploring the Amazon basin, or street shooting in Havana, or street shooting in New York city, your best subjects are always going to be people.” This was the main idea behind photographer and photojournalist Milton Moore’s presentation at the Delchev Auditorium on Thursday, Nov. 14. He came to AUBG to present his exhibition “Working Men, Working Boats”, but what he did was much more than that — he gave valuable advice to aspiring photographers on how they can find their place in the world of photography and photojournalism.
A piece of advice from the journalist is to always demonstrate transparency in your projects. The key to gaining credibility is informing the audience of the five essential Ws in media writing — who, what, when, where, and especially in the case of documentary photography and photojournalism — why. You should also always describe what you have left out from your documentary project and your reasoning behind doing so for the same purpose.
Making credible and noteworthy projects would however be a waste if a journalist doesn’t reach many people. “To get noticed globally, you have to start locally,” Moore says. These are the steps he gives to creating a successful documentary project:
Step 1: Ask for editing advice. Having someone else check your projects for any “blind spots” is essential to creating good content.
Step 2: Make sure that your captions and statement make the project perfectly clear. Make the narrative advanced to make the purpose transparent. This is important for both your project’s credibility and to yours as a professional.
Step 3: Post your work online. It’s important to have a visually appealing website, as it draws the viewer in.
Step 4: Visit the local newspaper personally. Do not send emails, as editors receive a ton of them daily, and the chances of yours being ignored are high. They will be interested in your project, because you’d be what is called a “citizen journalist”. And “citizen journalism” is gaining tremendous credibility with commercial media nowadays.
In case the medium publishes your project, they will link it to your site. This will give both you and your project credibility, plus it will boost the odds of it getting picked up by other sites. And that is how you go from local to global.
Milton Moore has a degree in Journalism from the Boston University, with an emphasis on Magazine and Feature writing. It wasn’t until he got a job as a reporter at the Cape Cod Times that he became interested in photography.
He shares how he quickly became drawn to the sea, got his own boat, and made a lot of friends among the fishermen at Cape Cod. The independent spirit of these men is what really attracted him to them, and he was pleasantly surprised by how easily he was accepted in their midst. “If you show people that you’re interested in them, and what they do has merit, they’ll invite you in,” he says.
Even though the everyday life of a fisherman may seem extremely ordinary to some people, Moore says that if you can gain access to places that people generally don’t see, you make discoveries for them. Which is precisely what makes your pictures truly matter.
“And once you gain access, a key to good documentary work is to keep returning to these places again and again,” says Moore. The photojournalist explained that, in the beginning, he found a purely “pictorial” appeal to the place and the community he was in. But as he kept returning to the dock, he got inspired to create this project. And 30 years after he made the original black and white photos, he digitized them and made the exhibition that we see today as “Working Men, Working Boats.”
Thinking back on this project, Moore shared that what “animated” the images was not the boat itself, but the hard work of these men. He believes he was lucky to have been among the fishermen at Cape Cod between 1976 and 1982, because legislative changes in 1976 changed the fishing business entirely.
This is precisely what adds value to every photo you ever take — the fact that it captures moments of history which cannot be found anywhere anymore.
In his closing remarks, Moore encouraged us all to express ourselves through our cameras. He told us to think of these photos as “the ultimate selfies”, as they encapsulate the way we see the world and therefore say more about us than any old selfie ever could.
“In a world that posts millions of photos a day, […] photos that are meaningful to people, photos that feel like real life, and not reality TV, are the photos that will endure and make you proud.”
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Mirela Harizanova is a Journalism and Mass Communications major at the American University in Bulgaria, minoring in Political Science and Spanish Language. She is a newbie when it comes to photography, but she already has an idea of how she can implement the useful tips Milton Moore gave in this presentation.
