Get Uncomfortable
The aim is to make work that no one else is capable of making, either because they lack access, time, effort, or vision. A first project is an investment in time and energy, but it will pay off. It'll inform your future style and pave the way for introductions to clients.
Looking for topics close to home is a good idea, they’re possible to pursue around normal life without the expense and time-drain of long-distance travel. You'll also have the benefit of knowing the local area.
A subject with national scope is important, and new angles on existing stories are valuable. Is there a group of people in your hometown who’re doing something radically different? Make friends with them and return over long periods of time to document.
Perhaps there’s a landscape that’s exhibiting faster than normal climate change? Or an athlete training for a record attempt? Visit once a week, photograph through the seasons, make it your story.
This is the part of journalism that is romanticized - spending time inside a story, living with your story’s characters, eating with them, traveling with them. Enjoy this part if you can, it’s why you’re here!
In the beginning these experiences can be uncomfortable. There is skepticism toward outsiders, journalists particularly, of motive, and character. But gradually familiarity develops, people relax, and barriers are lowered.
Throughout my career I’ve spent time with people at both ends of the political and economic spectrum. With shared experiences differences dissolve, not that we suddenly agree on issues, but there’s an understanding of intent. It’s an empathy that can be passed on to an audience, a way to explain and interpret the hurdles that we face as a society.
After I left America and the Texas survivalists I went back home to England. There was a push by a local council to evict a group of migrant travelers, who self-identify as “gypsies”, from land that they had purchased in a rural community north of London.
The gypsy’s land was a ten-acre square, with trailers and small buildings. They’d bought the plot a decade before in a move to settle down, grow roots, and live a less transient life. But there was tension between the gypsies and local residents, and politicians began inventing narratives to evict the gypsy community.
The gypsies fortified their land with concrete walls, scaffold balustrades, and barbed wire. Activists moved in to help, creating barricades of burning tires, and locking themselves to gates to stop police dozers forcing inside.
Over months I’d visit. Initially one of the gypsies met me at a nearby train station and smuggled me past police checkpoints into the camp, hiding me in the back of his Transit van under an old mattress.
The first days were uncomfortable, physically and socially. I slept outside for a few nights, it was cold, and I was alone. No one trusted me enough to allow me an interview or a photograph. Eventually I was offered a vacant trailer to use while I was there. The gypsies showed me a secret way in, through a tunnel under the wall, and out across the fields, so I could come and go as I pleased.
In the end riot police raided the land, bricks were thrown, trailers were burned, and activists arrested. It was a sad ending, and a sensitive issue handled terribly by the government.
I hadn’t pitched the story ahead of time. But after the community was evicted, I packaged up the best photos and wrote an article. Vice was interested, and published images and text across a few pages in their printed magazine.
The key is finding enough time to make that really special piece of work. Finding enough time, finding enough energy, and hanging out around your topic through that uncomfortable first period, until you’re accepted. It’s about laying the foundation for the type of work that you want to make in the future.
Drink a lot of coffee, get inspired, and fall in love with your project for some time.