“When it works, it’s magic.”

The work you see here is all over the lot. It reflects the path of a general assignment photographer. I’ve never had the luxury, or the desire, to call myself any one thing in photography, like a portrait photographer or a sports shooter. I’ve pretty much done it all, mostly because I enjoy it all, and to a degree, I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. When you have an irritable wire service editor on deadline in NYC screaming at you to go shoot this damn job and get it back to the office on deadline so they can get your miserable images on the wire and beat the other competitive publications to the punch, well, that’s not the time to talk to them about what you’d really like to do as a personal project so you can express yourself.

I’m being mildly facetious here. I’ve never needed cajoling to get behind the camera. I’m as in love with the sound of the shutter now, forty years downstream, as I was when I was an excited, mistake-prone pup in my first years in New York. The field has changed, and the clients have changed, but the basic mission has never changed. Be a good storyteller. It sounds deceptively simple, doesn’t it? Tell stories, shoot pictures! Wow, I’ve got a smartphone! I can surely do that!

And of course, anyone can. Nowadays, making a reasonable picture, a correctly exposed picture, a shot that is sharp, publishable, printable, Instagram-worthy, even, is absurdly simple. But a correctly exposed picture is not necessarily a good picture.

The alchemy that only occasionally occurs at the lens is something we all seek. It’s when our head, heart, sympathies, timing, and intuition somehow line up with the gesture we are observing, and the click of the camera freezes that gesture for all time. It’s maddeningly difficult. So much can go wrong. It only goes sublimely right a very small percentage of the time. It’s a delicate, infinitely fragile process, but when it connects, the results are quite durable, and become part of our memories.

When it works, it’s magic. I’m still behind the camera. I still seek the magic.

http://joemcnally.com

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