Ed Kashi

Ed Kashi is charismatic proponent of photojournalism. In this FotoTV video he is spell-bindingly direct and passionate about his work. For him it all began as a teenager wanting to tell stories, and then going to college to learn to be a writer. In the freshman year the students had to make photographs too. And the young Kashi had never done this before. So he borrowed money from his family and rented a Ricoh. That was the beginning of a switch from words to pictures.

That’s why he calls himself a visual storyteller and why he’s been telling stories now from all over the world for over thirty years.

His motivation is a compassionate and engaged interest in social and political themes. His general approach is to choose an issue and work on it in depth. And by ‘in depth’ we’re not talking about days, weeks or months: We’re talking about five years working in the Niger Delta on oil, development and militancy, about eight years on aging in America.

His first significant project was on the protestant community in Northern Ireland.  The resulting images appearing in a small, self-published book. This led to his working in 1991 for the National Geographic Magazine. A 26-week contract covering the Kurds was followed by a project on the Jewish settlers on the West Bank.

This project, however, was brought to a sudden end by the then rapidly expanding Internet. It never occurred to Kashi, and probably to most other photojournalists at that time, that the subjects of their work would actually see and read about themselves. In this very early case it was the words accompanying the images on the Internet that caused consternation amongst the settler community. They told to get out!

Beginning in 1995 Ed realized that he wanted to look at his own culture in America. He chose an issue that will increasingly affect all western cultures, at many levels, and for the coming twenty to thirty years: Aging - a demographic shift of gigantic proportions. Many older people will remain fit and full of life. But many will be poor, depressed and lonely. We will need massive number of caregivers, not only health specialists but also simple companions and helpers. Kashi’s involvement here is almost tangible; it shines through what he says and in some of his most moving images.

Moving images, this time in the literal sense of video, is another subject on which Kashi has interesting things to say. While he uses video himself, he makes an impassioned plea for the value of still photography. “Moving images wash over you – they are passive. They don’t require much of the viewer. A still photograph requires the viewer to work, to look carefully. You need to look for detail. You need to analyse. You need to read some kind of contextual information to understand what is going on.  It demands that you think. It’s almost meditative.”

In 2009 Ed Kashi published ‘Three’, a book of trypticons. It was a dramatic departure from photojournalism. Perhaps inspired by the multiple screens common in multimedia events, the photographs in each set of three may come from entirely different places and siituation, but they share something that makes a new statement, gives a new insight.

Despite the shrinkage of printed ‘real estate’ for visual storytelling, photojournalism, according to Ed Kashi, is more alive and vibrant in all corners of the globe than ever before. He is full of encouragement for young photographers. Their work appears mostly online: “It’s just that we haven’t yet figured out a way to make a living out of this!”

Ed’s philosophy, and the message of this video is that ultimately, to make good photographs you have to tap into your creative soul, into your passions. Know what is it you want to do with your work. The camera is only a tool.