A Beginner’s Guide to Documenting Daily Life: Composition Part II (Details and Environment)

One of the common threads you’ll often hear documentary, reportage, and street photographers discuss is curiosity.  In a world of constant scrolling, it often takes effort to step away from technology and allow ourselves the space to be curious, to day dream, and to wonder about the things we find interesting.  Curiosity about the world, its people, and our experiences are critical to creating images of personal value, whether those images will be featured on the front of the New York Times or displayed with magnets on the family refrigerator.  Both have value.  

Going back to the previous post (Composition Part I), the idea of seeing with your heart ties directly in with curiosity and observation.  The intention driving most of my work is my experience as both a mother and a woman and the desire to document those identities and their intersection in the world at large.  Ironically, very few of my images include my actual face, but every single one of them is my voice and my perspective.  I have been curious about my children from the day I found out I was pregnant for the first time.  There are journals full of stories about them, the things they said to me, the struggles I’ve felt in never being enough for them.  A few of those pages have ink smeared by falling tears.  Life is complicated.  Our children are complicated.  To wonder about our children is just one part of parenthood.  We see them at their best, and their worst (and they get to see ours).  We get to know their quirks, their passions, their likes and dislikes.  We bend over backward to make their childhood dreams come true, like the time I cut up cardboard boxes during the winter olympics and made “skis” for Jackson, used all of my eyeliner to draw beards and mustaches on Carter’s face to make him into a “real pirate,” or slept in a too small tent with Sawyer on our back deck, only to be awoken at 4 am by the sound of raccoons having a fight to the death.  We see them for who they are, their strengths and weaknesses, and we spend nights wide awake with worry over them.  In many ways, the best photographs are born out of relationships, where there is a sense of trust and comfort, where the participants in the photograph can be their honest selves.  Photographers often have to make quick work of gaining trust of their clients (especially children) and most documentary photographers (who often spend entire days photographing families) will tell you that the more time they spend with the people they are photographing, the better the images will be.  There is a sense of trust and comfort that builds and makes space for vulnerability.  It is in that space where it is possible to create deeply meaningful images of people, as they are.  

As we make the conscious effort to document our family life, we create that space for the people with whom we share our lives.  Then, in this space, it is so important to be curious about people and the details that give them character and shape in the world.  Details that include their passions, schedules, quirks, gestures, messes, possessions, needs, and dreams are all potential photographs that tell the narrative stories of the people we love. 

INCLUDE PERSONAL DETAILS 

A photo doesn’t need a person’s face to tell their story.  It can be toys left on the stairs, beach towels and sand in the garage, cups at a bedside, Cheerios on the ground, or sparkle shoes in the corner.  Be curious and observant of how people express their personalities, whether it’s through environmental details or evidence that shows how they have left their mark in a physical space. 

LOOK FOR PATTERNS 

Lines, shapes, similarities, opposites are elements in the environment that can be used in composition. In the first image below, Carter were at a vet appointment with our puppy and I noticed that the shape of their legs in the same plane. I took this directly from above them with my iPhone, and the details of the toy and Carter’s shoes and socks tell more about the story.

USE SHADOWS AND REFLECTIONS

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If anything, this can be one of the greatest compositional tools to help share about a person’s identity. It’s an opportunity to use what’s around you to strengthen an image and tell a deeper story. Take the first image below as an example. Instead of taking a photo of Jackson in front of the castle, I noticed the reflection in his glasses and used that to tell a deeper story. We were walking into the Magic Kingdom just after he turned 13, and I thought about the fact that he wasn’t the little boy he used to be, but he still loves the magic of being in Disney World. There is a lot of deeper personal meaning in this image, because of the details I intentionally included.

GESTURE AND BODY LANGUAGE

Details can also give the sense of a person, through their gesture and body language.  Sometimes, one of my kids will give me a look that makes me see so much likeness of someone in our family, even if just for a split second. But when I see an image like the first one below, it’s all uniquely ONE person. He’s the one who always turned his leg like this waiting for the bus, who wore shorts all through the winter months. Be observant about the subtle details that make a person uniquely them and make an intention to document that when you see it repeated.

PERSONAL SPACE AND ENVIRONMENT

A person’s environment or place that they love can be used to communicate ideas about that person in a photograph. As my kids got older, like in the school aged years, I noticed how their bedrooms became more important to them. They wanted certain toys out, certain things hung on the walls, furniture arranged in a certain way. Some of that drove me crazy, like when someone used packing tape to hang up ripped magazine pages of professional athletes or took liberty to rearrange furniture, I have a lot of love for the images of them in the spaces they used to express themselves. Now that we’ve moved to a new house (and they have moved on from the toys and characters they loved when they were small) I’m thankful for those images because they say so much about each of my kids. On the other hand, my husband reminds me of an excited kid every time we go to the mountains, and I do my best (with frozen fingers) to try to capture his happiness when we’re traveling to places he loves.

In the end, a technically perfect photograph that lacks passion or a message is just a photograph.  But when composed and created with intention, it becomes a story.  In the next installment, I’ll be sharing about how to use photographs together to create a stronger storytelling narrative.  Stay tuned!

This post is the third in the series “The Visual Time Capsule: A Beginner’s Guide to Documenting Daily Life.” You can see previous posts here and here.