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| photo of Sara Lafleur-Vetter |
How'd you first get into photography?
I first got into photography in a couple different ways. My older sister majored in photography in college so she more than likely turned me onto it at a young age (she's seven years older than me) . The first photography classes I took were at the Community Art Center in Wallingford, PA where I grew up. I was 13 or so. The photo teacher was this kooky guy who looked like Keith Herring and had Elvis Costello black rimmed glasses and he traveled to Africa and had these stunning black and white images of half naked Africans standing in this barren landscape. I was of course very curious about these pictures and how he got all the way over there. I immediately tried to get hired at the center to be his assistant in the darkroom. I remember him walking me around the darkroom explaining the chemicals: how to mix the developer, the stop bath, the fixer. How to set everything up and take it down. I don't think I got hired, but I do remember that once he accidentally left out some contacts of these pictures he had taken of himself making out with his date in a car. Me and another girl in the class made fun of him for being creepy. Clearly he had to set the camera up on timer to get the shot of him kissing the girl and that's a pretty good reason to make fun of your geeky photo teacher. He had left them on the drying rack or something and I guess that was my first encounter with the voyeuristic, risky, documentary power of photography.
I should add that I didn't have a dad growing up, that I learned about him from flipping through photo albums and thus, I developed a unique fixation with photos in a way other people might not. I came to know this person I idealized only through pictures; I poured myself into them.
I should add that I didn't have a dad growing up, that I learned about him from flipping through photo albums and thus, I developed a unique fixation with photos in a way other people might not. I came to know this person I idealized only through pictures; I poured myself into them.
I didn't completely fall in love with photography until I was 15 and I went to this summer program for high school kids called Horizons. Now it's called Snow Farm - it's an art camp up in Massachusetts. I totally fell in love with my photography teacher. Not in the romantic sense--in the sense that he filled the father/older male mentor role in my life at that time and he was just the kind of bohemian documentary person I was craving. It was the first setting where I got to not just have a photo teacher but also kind of interact with him at bonfires and outside of class. His pictures were mostly pictures of himself dressed up in women's lingerie and transsexuals and drag queens and nuns with guns. Gender and societal taboos. But he also introduced us to the greats - Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment is the one I remember from the class slideshow. The man jumping over the puddle with one foot dipping into the reflective puddle. I attached myself to Sean. I was fairly androgynous at the time so I was honored when he took my portrait dressed in a cloak with short hair. Also I remember the camp talent show - I read a lesser-known Jack Kerouac poem about dirty assholes and following my public reading he leapt on stage and started break-dancing. We got along. One day he mentioned to me that his girlfriend lived in Philly so we ended up getting together the three of us. To cut to the chase, I had an opportunity in high school to do a one month internship and I took this opportunity to live with Sean and his (now wife) Susan in NYC. I worked in the professional Manhattan photo studio where Sean still works today and got to experience that whole commercial studio atmosphere at the ripe age of 15. We are still really tight and Sean and Susan are like second parents to me. They mean the world.
What kinds of subjects are you drawn to?
Sometimes the person is someone you meet on the street or sometimes you hear about an interesting figure or group from a friend and you have to go and invade that world and it always feels like you're going into battle; there's always that initial period of bombardment, where you go into their territory with your camera and you feel like you are wielding a weapon and you have to somehow show them that you are there to listen to them, to get their side of things, not to attack them.
On the other side of the spectrum, I'm just a really sensitive person so if I see something that appeals directly to my emotions, something that sticks right into my gut, of course I'm drawn to that. Like a story that watches my sister as she develops into mother or a story that covers a couple. There are mountains of stories to tell about the things that happen between people in love.
How do you get people to let down their guard? How do you show them that the camera isn’t a weapon, and that you aren’t there to attack?
Bakhtin came up with this idea that you have a new language for each person you talk to (he called it разноречие - different-speech-ness or "heteroglossia" as the anthropologists like to call it). You talk to your loverman one way and you talk to your landlord in another. This is fact. And we do it for a reason. To communicate you need to adjust the way you express yourself and your ideas. So the way you get people to let down their guard is show them that you can relate - talk to them in their language on whatever it is that matters to them, show them you've got a sense of humor, or show them that you care. You remind them that you are on their side by asking about their family, about their job, their health, the things that matter to them. Take a couple dignified shots of them in beautiful light and show them a couple great pictures. Most people love to see themselves. Of course, this doesn't always work for everyone.
Your flickr contains several amazingly intimate, warm photos of family and friends. Do you tend to always have a camera on hand?
I don’t see my family very often. When I do see them it's usually when I've just returned from being abroad or away for a year or so, so these meetings are really special for me. When I was away in Russia my sister had a baby, so when I came home I got to see this entirely new life that she had that I had never witnessed before. Each time I come home her life and her family has evolved in some way so it's very natural for me to want to have the camera around. It's not like that with other things in my life because they are not as novel for me.
Although I wish I always had a camera on hand, I've always been the kind of shooter who picks up the camera when I'm in awe of something, when something makes my jaw drop. I picked up the camera and started shooting in Russia in 2001 like that - just in complete awe of the foreign landscape and the different way things looked over there. I suppose that novelty can go away in daily life pretty fast as you develop routines and you get used to landscapes and people. But whenever I visit my family, it has that sense of newness for me usually and I make a point to have the camera by to capture things. Growing up without a dad helped get me into photography in the first place, by learning about him through old photo album and news clippings and such. So I'm pretty invested in keeping my family close to me by documenting them.
How do you juggle picture taking and story-gathering?
To be honest, I'm just getting into story-gathering. Or rather, I've been into it all along but I've hardly ever been able to pull it off. One of my photo mentors once told me that anyone can take a good picture, but it takes something else to tell a story. It's easy to get 5-10 good photos about an issue. But to pull off 15-25 really great pictures on any one issue is really tricky and takes time. This is something I need to commit to.
I'm also interested in getting into multimedia ways of storytelling, combining photos, audio recordings, video, and music. I think combining two or three mediums is strongest when it comes to story-telling, when you have not only the still image, but also video, sound clips of your subject talking, background, atmosphere and music.
Tell me about a photo that you’re particularly proud of.
It's a picture from Luxor, Egypt where I lived from October 2008 to June 2010. It's probably one of the best pictures I've taken in the last couple years and it tells the story of what's going on in Luxor right now pretty well. The city is being torn down and re-made in order to boost tourism. Lots of amazing historical buildings are being destroyed and the locals have of course no say in this and their homes are being destroyed left and right. Government officials take their homes, which have been in the family for generations and house multiple families and they throw a tiny bit of money at them, enough to rent a place for a couple years, and then tell them to find other housing. It's totally unjust. They should be compensated with homes of the same quality or better than what they were already living in. Instead they are thrown a tiny amount of money, which they couldn't even use to buy a tiny piece of land. Just a joke. This picture captures the everyday urgency of that situation, which is how I often felt walking down the streets. One day we'd be hanging out with a friend on this street - which was basically the street we lived on, and the next day his house would be in rubble.
I'm proud of this photo because it shows the chaos of it all, the building looks like its about to crash on this guys truck or maybe already did and this lady happened to be rushing out of the alley trying to avoid the debris. This is how things were done. No precautions are made for your safety. If you are in the way while we are knocking a building over - well, you are in the way.
You have lived in Russia and Egypt, and traveled an enormous amount besides. What's it been like moving back to the states? Do you have any travel plans kicking around?
Moving back to the states is a good feeling, and San Francisco seems right for now. It's a relief to be surrounded by like-minded people, to be able to bike everywhere, and to have the freedom to do things I want to do. Life's definitely a little more straightforward in the U.S. in that I speak the language and there isn't a huge bureaucratic monster looming around every corner. On the other hand, there are gas, electric, water and cell phone companies looming around every corner, threatening to turn off my electricity, water, and disconnect my phone. And while you might not have to worry about the city coming by with a notice saying they're going to bulldoze your house in a week, a big gas company might show up and start fraking in your backyard, basically forcing you and your family to relocate because of a poisoned water supply (my sister's family is plagued right now by a gas company called Encana that's begun "fracking" (hydraulic fracturing, i.e. blasting millions of gallons of toxic chemicals in the ground to release natural gas) in her neighborhood in rural PA.).
I kind of feel behind the times in a lot of ways compared to my peers who've been holding up real jobs and living in America on their own for years now. In a sense I kind of piggy-backed on my musician boyfriend in Russia for a few years, working odd jobs and paying back my grad school loans. In Egypt, I managed to work for two years and save a lot of money and now I'm back in America, and getting a real job with all my bizarre and loosely-related skills seems laughable. But I'm hoping I can get involved in an organization that I'm passionate about.
As for travel, I have rough plans to bike from St. Petersburg, Russia to Spain this summer with a friend. I hope I can commit and make this happen. It's always scary buying a thousand dollar plane ticket months in advance when you don't know what's around the corner. But years from now when I have babies or a real job I won't be able to pull it off, so now's the time. Of course, Africa still calls, and I imagine I'll try to make a big trip there again before I find a place to hang my boots.
Check out more of Lafleur’s work on her website, her flickr, and lovebryan. And check out a rad video she made here.
