Almost to date a year ago I had a discussion in Sarajevo with my assistant at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, Samantha, about a story that she did recently as a part of her curriculum at the University of Austin, Texas.

The story was about a young man, who as a five year old, migrated illegally to the US with his family. Being without papers, he is restricted in so many ways, and Sam’s story tracks him as he tries to become a legal citizen.

In terms of approach it was a fairly basic story that showed us the protagonist’s environment combined with interviews of him. And then there was this beautifully lid shot in a blacked out room where he would sit and talk to the camera. A black, non-descriptive room.

“Where is this?”, I asked.

“We made it”, she said.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way my teacher told me to do it”.

Well, obviously you should always do what your teacher tells you to do (especially if it’s me) but seriously, the idea of the black box-talking head is a convention that needs to die. Because it doesn’t make sense. We spend a lot of time as photojournalists by going to weird places all over the globe in order to be a witness on behalf of the audience. We spent countless hours in trying to record and document an environment, and then you totally ruin that experience by pulling your protagonist out of his environment and placing him in the black box. What is it we hope to achieve by doing that?

Talking Heads are there as the journalist’s argument that this isn’t something that he or she invented, but a piece of fact as stated by the protagonist. But what about the Black Box? It’s an artificial setting outside time and place, a construct that destroys your efforts in giving us, the audience, that feeling of being there.

So we need to do it differently — the talking head shot. Because having a close-up shot of your protagonist’s face, seeing the emotions rolling across it, works for identification and intimacy. I’m just sick and tired of editors asking for those kind of shots just “-because that’s the way we do it around here.” Even my editor at the time didn’t knew why — it was simply a matter of blind obedience to some sort of modus operandum.

In the recent past BFC have tried hard to not show talking heads at all, and we actively encourage our students not to do them. So moving on, maybe it’s time for a rethinking of a construct nobody really seems know the reason for. It’s time to go ‘Different’. Maybe it will even add up to a new convention.