CALIBER

photo by Armand Emamdjomeh

I first met Armand because we had both taken a photo of the same Mariachi musician in the Mission within days of each other (you can see my photo here and his here) and I sent him an email to say hello and introduce myself. I’m glad I did: Armand is a passionate photographer and all-around great guy. Below you’ll find a bunch of questions I had for him…

Give us an idea of what photojournalism is and how it differs from street or documentary photography. How close are these disciplines and where do they differ?

You know, I think the three are all related. Photojournalism is attempting to tell a story through images, and street and documentary photography fit into the rubric of photojournalism as a whole.  I might be wrong, but I’d diagram it like this:

Photojournalism <– Documentary Photography <– Street Photography

In all photojournalism, I think the emphasis is on reflecting the truth of the moment as best you can through the camera. Any photoshopping beyond what you can do in the darkroom is generally shunned, beyond exposure control, unsharp masking, and exposure adjustments. I also make adjustments to color and tonality, since I find digital in general to be far more flat than film photos, and sometimes I like to emulate the look of my favorite films, like Tri-X or Portra.

I find street to be a very specific type of photography, Cartier-Bresson, Boogie or Robert Frank-style, where the photographer is as candid as possible, attempting to capture the environment about them in as candid a fashion as possible, and focuses on documenting an area (Paris, Belgrade, the Mission) or a region (the United States).

Documentary photography – and street is a part of this – I think tends to describe longer term, more in-depth projects and could document really any type of topic. Wars, drug-resistant tuberculosis, drug use, death row, rural Mississippi or rich kids in LA, these are all various documentary photo projects I’ve seen. In this case, a lot of times people will know the photographer’s there, and in many cases it involves very intimate work with subjects, rather than the anonymous approach that I see a lot of the time with street photography.

What photojournalists past and present inspire you? If you could spend a day with a photographer, living or dead, who would it be and why?

I guess you could say the classics – Robert Capa, Robert Frank, Eugene Richards, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Larry Burroughs. I feel like their work has a timelessness that’ll never get old, and they’ve already inspired generations of photographers. In more contemporary stuff, of course there’s James Nachtwey, and I really enjoy Tyler Hicks’s work for the New York Times. Platform-wise, I’m really inspired by the Lens blog.  Also, if you haven’t seen Danny Wilcox Frazier’s piece “Driftless” on MediaStorm, you should.

And of course I’m really inspired by the images coming out of Iran this summer, by brave shooters who risked arrest and torture or worse to get the story out to the world. I’m inspired by anyone who’ll risk their neck for a story.

This would probably change a lot, but right now I imagine it would be great to spend a day with the photographer Boogie. His work shows such a unique, dark view of the world, and they’re supposed to be produced through a week of mad, non-stop shooting. I really dig it.

You travel a lot. Tell us about a memorable instance where having your camera made an impact of what you were experiencing. What would be your dream destination for photographic purposes?

I had just gotten my camera at the time, but when I was in the West Bank, I brought my camera and went for a walk along the Separation Wall in Ramallah. It’s really an incredible place, one where terms like “security fence” or even “separation wall” don’t really do it justice. Along with my entire experience in the West Bank, this was one of those days where I realized I could finally say something to my friends back home about what it was like – about how there were people just going about their daily business, even though there might be a 20-foot wall between them and the guy who used to live across the street.

Dream destinations, I’d really love to go to Pakistan or Afghanistan, or back to Lebanon, but really most of all I’d love to go to Iran.

Is there a distinction between photography for reporting purposes, and photography for art’s sake?

Definitely. When you’re photographing for reporting, sure you want to make a beautiful image, but what’s more it has to say something. Somehow you have to capture the story within the frame of your photographs. This can make things a lot more difficult because though you can have a beautiful image you really love, an editor would never run it because it doesn’t say anything about the story.

In this sense, photography for art’s sake is a lot freer than photography for reporting purposes, because you can just work on making a great image, and forget about any overall story. Also, in reporting, you can’t photoshop things excessively.

Share a favorite photograph with us that you’ve taken and tell us about it.

I like this picture, taken at 24th and Mission. It’s on my favorite camera, on my favorite film, but there’s also something about these viejitos that I feel is really timeless. Like they’ve been there forever, and they always will be there. One time a friend told me she looked up from that crosswalk and saw the same three guys, in the same position, it was like walking into the photo.

Walk us through your current camera gear and workflow.

Gear…really starving for gear right now, at least in the digital realm. I’ve got a Canon 30D with a standard 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens and a 50mm f/1.4 – which I love, but it shoots just a little too tight for me with the crop factor on the APS-C sensor on the Canon. I need to get a fast wide lens, and upgrade to a full-frame body. Those are my goals for now.

My favorite camera is my Nikon FM2n. It’s a great fully-manual 35mm film body, and there’s something I really love about shooting with it, how you have to see the shot coming, frame, focus manually, and you have to choose your shots wisely because you have to re-cock the shutter with every frame. I also really like loading film.

I also have a Bronica medium format camera body, it’s older than I am and even more awkward and clunky, but I love it. Last, I’m borrowing a Hasselblad medium format for a project I’m currently working on (more below), which is a lot of fun to work with.

Wish list: Leica M-something (I don’t really care, the old ones are awesome and the newer models are just as awesome), and either a Canon 5D Mk II or a Nikon D700.

Workflow – really I just download everything into one of my storage drives, and use Lightroom or Bridge (for when I’m feeling lazy, since sometimes LR feels a little heavy) to work with the RAW files. I’ll export my favorite RAWs to JPEGs, and tweak them in Photoshop. I really don’t do a whole lot of photoshopping, besides tweaking the levels and curves, white balance and getting the tonal ranges right and such. I don’t have the patience for it.

Are you working on any current projects?

Yup! I’m actually working on a project on mixed-race and identity in America. It’s basically a series of portraits and interviews that seek to document the inherent conflicts and struggles of growing up mixed between multiple identities in a society that likes to pigeonhole people into one stereotype or another. I grew up in a mixed Iranian-Guatemalan household in southern Louisiana so I guess it’s a little narcissistic.

I’ve also really been enjoying video work again, and I just finished work on a package about herring fishermen, which you can see here.

Tell us something about yourself that few people know about you (relating to photography).

I hate having any sort of involvement in the making of the photograph. I think that’s why I have so much trouble with portraiture – I can’t direct. There’s something about forcing a person to act this way or that that I just can’t work with yet. It’s frustrating. Sometimes I’d just tell the person to sit back, chill and act like I’m not there, even though I’m like two feet away with a Hasselblad staring at their face. But people are at their most interesting when no one else is around, or at least when they think no one else is around.

Thanks, Armand!

Links:
www.emamdphoto.com/blog
www.missionlocal.org
www.flickr.com/photos/users/emamd

Bio: Armand picked up photography while working at a Los Angeles-based international relief and development organization, a position that eventually led him to be in response teams to Hurricane Katrina and long-term posting in the West Bank. While traveling and shooting throughout the Middle East is great fun, he’s also grateful to live in one of the best cities to photograph in the world. Originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Armand is getting his Master’s Degree in photojournalism and multimedia at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.