The Need to Record

Occasionally someone asks me why I make pictures. It’s a great question, and one that I’ve answered before, but sometimes I like to retreat back to the face value of that question and make sure I’m still on the up and up. Still speaking the truth. Still have a valid reason. The question typically doesn’t come from a casual angle. The question typically comes from the idea that I spent the bulk of my adult life staring at the world through a metal box. Photography is strange. It really is, so why dedicate your life and career to such a pursuit? Well, like most things, it’s complicated.

At the core of why I make pictures is a profound sense of needing to record, and when I say record I mean anything. This little affliction first landed on my radar in grade school. I would steal my mother’s notebooks she used to create her grocery shopping lists and I would instead use these books to write short stories, the violent fiction that little boys just love for some reason. Most of my stories were also based on Chuck Norris movies. I didn’t know about things like plagiarism, so names, story lines and action were all based on good old Chuck and his amazing array of life-changing movies.

At some point, pen and paper were replaced by the camera, which I see as a very natural path. My father detested photography, thought of it as a hobby at best, but my mother on the other hand was a true believer in the power of photographic preservation and pursuit. I thought her battered Halliburton case was my third sibling. It went EVERYWHERE with us. But mom wasn’t a poser. Not in her life and she certainly didn’t force us to pose. She was a believer in the real and the natural. Consequently, our garage is filled with trays of Kodachrome, real-life reportage of the Milnor clan.  An archive of our family history all based on her ability and conviction.

At some point, pen and paper were replaced by the camera, which I see as a very natural path.

After graduating from high school I settled my sights on a geology degree and a life spent in the wilds of the world looking for precious things like water. Not oil, no never, didn’t even cross my mind. Not once. Promise. But during a botched admissions experiment I found myself staring at a semester at a community college, completely second guessing my entire life. I had begun to carry a camera with me at all times, and suddenly found myself faced with the offer of a photography scholarship. Photojournalism to be precise. Now, “scholarship” was a grand total of roughly $50, a fact I always left out when describing my academic prowess. “Yep, on a full ride actually.” “Kind of a big deal in the old photography world.” I had no idea what was about to happen.

I was consumed by making pictures. Photography became my purpose, my cause. I immediately began making pictures for the school newspaper, an award winning publication that threw me to the wolves from the moment I walked in. Assignment photography was challenging, scary but also honed my skills. The pressure of the deadline became an addiction. I also began to undertake my first long-term projects, something that would eventually become my entire focus. I also began to understand the power of photograph, the photograph as evidence and the responsibility I had to the people in my photographs. If something was happened I wanted to be there. Right there.

I spent three months photographing a young woman with cerebral palsy who was learning to walk. I made my first trips to the dynamically fluid US/Mexico border, and nights were spent with a police scanner cruising the streets of San Antonio. I was all in.

I was consumed by making pictures. Photography became my purpose, my cause.

But I realized something almost from the beginning. Photography to me was not about fame or fortune. In fact none of us in the small, hardcore group that formed ever once spoke about making money or being known. All that mattered was the work. The photographs. No matter what happened, no matter what we had to do to make ends me, what would remain was the image. Nobody could take them from us, and the pursuit of the image was a large part of the game. Many of my colleagues were fueled by being published, but I never cared. For me it was the thrill of the hunt, the capture of the image itself and then the solitude of the darkroom where I would fully merge with the work.

Years and many, many rolls of film later I’m still making pictures. I don’t make my living with images but they are still very much a part of my life. My mother finally put her camera down, so I picked up the torch of family documentarian. I still do projects, tell stories and fixate far too much on photography, but after all these years I haven’t come close to fully exploring the photographic possibilities.