Intended Intimacy, Unintended Consequences – Part 1

In one of my Master’s in Multimedia Journalism graduate classes at the University of Miami’s School of Communication, we have recently been discussing the relationship between a documentary photographer and his/her subjects – Is the proper, ethical relationship strictly professional, or can an ethical photographer/subject relationship include or evolve into something that is a more nebulous amalgamation of the professional and the personal – a friendship based on a professional relationship – as a result of the necessarily intimate and confessional nature of the interaction?

In no way do I claim any greater insight on this long standing and complex discussion than the next guy or gal with a camera strung around his/her neck, but having worked as a professional photographer for 25 years and during that time photographed “people in their environments” literally throughout “North America and the entire world,” (that’s 50 countries and 38 states thus far) I have the experience of countless photographer/subject relationships to draw upon as I consider the issue.

One of these relationships came to mind during class last week, and I would like to share it here, along with two edits of the one-minute film that was born of that relationship.

Glenda Collier’s 29-year-old son, Walter Lee Collier, was shot and killed during the early morning hours of November 27, 2009, in Miami, Florida.  I had met Glenda at her son’s wake in December while I was working on my “Eye of Overtown” story with Jovan “Bonna” Lamb, who was photographing the gathering.  In early 2010 I was looking for a new story to shoot in Overtown, and Glenda came to mind.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I was under severe deadline pressure.  I didn’t have Glenda’s telephone number.  In fact, I couldn’t even remember her name at the time.  But my lack of tact, or my hubris, or just my plain disregard for social conventions allowed me to stop by her apartment unannounced, hoping she would remember me.

Thankfully, she not only remembered me, she graciously welcomed my camera and me into her home, with no prior notice, and willingly shared the story of her loss.

My agenda with Glenda’s story was pretty simple – I cared more about her personal thoughts and feelings about the sudden loss of her son than I did about framing the murder itself either legally or sociologically.  I wanted to tell the story from Glenda’s point of view, and I wanted to do so in a piece that would run no more than 60 seconds.

I spent a couple of hours chatting with Glenda that afternoon at her apartment in Overtown, asking her the kind of questions about her son’s murder that I suppose can be justified in the context of a journalistic enquiry, but only arguably so.  Over the next several days, I made a couple of late night trips to her workplace, a high dollar marina in South Beach, to shoot “B roll.”

Glenda mentioned to me during our interview that a security camera had recorded her son’s murder and that the local tee-vee newscasts had played the surveillance clip repeatedly in the days following the shooting.  I felt that my film needed to show the event in order for viewers to fully understand what had happened, and to more fully appreciate the pain that Glenda said she felt while “watching her son get shot.”  So I contacted the North Miami Police Department, which was investigating Walter’s murder, and acquired a copy of the footage.

Throughout the editing process, I wrestled with my justification for including the clip from the security camera, and whether it was necessary and appropriate to do so.  The footage was quite graphic.  I winced the first time I viewed it.  I noticed that just as the shooter emptied his gun, the brake lights of the car in which Walter and his female companion sat flashed quickly on, then off again.  I imagined that this was a result of some sort of involuntary spasm or reflex by Walter as he sat behind the wheel and the bullets entered his body.

I considered using an alternate clip, a montage of photographs of Walter that Glenda had shared with me, in the spot on the Final Cut Pro timeline where the security camera clip would go.  The montage would give viewers a better idea of who Walter was – of what he looked like, how he dressed, and how he carried himself.  But the story was not really about Walter, it was about Glenda, her feelings about Walter, and how her life was changed by a particular event that took all of about nine seconds to play out.

What would you have done? I decided to use the clip of the shooting.  I think it was the correct decision, but soon I would be surprised and saddened by an unintended consequence of that decision, as it related to someone I had grown close to during the last several days.

(To be continued…)