I’m going to tell you something that’s going to sound like complete bullshit coming from a guy who’s made real money with a camera: I fucking hate documentation.
Here I am. Supposedly a photographer, though don’t call me that, seriously, someone who’s shot work for Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Ron Athey, Alonzo King. Someone who ground it out at Mabou Mines with Lee Breuer, who actually made theater for years before somehow cranking out commercials and branded content for the tech overlords. And I’m telling you: documenting bores me to death.
Here’s why: documentation is about recording facts. And facts? Facts are not particularly interesting. Facts are the death of art. Facts are what accountants deal with. Facts are for Wikipedia and grant applications and those academic papers that make you want to put a gun in your mouth.
But it’s worse than boring.
Photographing performance might be inherently violent.
Even when I’m shooting my own work, my own site-specific pieces, I worry about the displacement that happens. The severing. You take something that exists in time and space, something alive and breathing and unrepeatable, and you kill it. André Bazin got it: photography embalms time. Roland Barthes said it even better: every photograph is a little death.
And then there are the other photographers. Fuck me, the other photographers. The ones I see at shows, at openings, performances, wielding their cameras like they’re storming fucking Normandy. Machine-gunning the performers. Rapid-fire shutter clicks. Spray and pray. Hoping that somewhere in those thousand frames, one will capture something.
This is violent.
This is the opposite of witnessing.
This is extraction.
Theft.
Susan Sontag warned us decades ago: the camera can be a weapon, a tool of appropriation, a way of asserting control over what you’re seeing. She was right. One shutter click too many and you’ve colonized someone’s gesture.
And yet. A point of view? That’s interesting. Feelings, impressions, the particular alchemy when one consciousness slams into another, that’s fascinating. That’s what I’m after. Honestly that’s the only thing worth a damn.
So here’s my truth: I don’t actually consider myself a photographer. I’m a theater director who uses a camera the way a novelist uses a typewriter. It’s a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Part of a broader practice.
Think about it. A writer might draft something by hand one day, type on her laptop the next, dictate into her phone the day after. The tool changes. The practice doesn’t. She knows her fountain pen bleeds a little, knows her laptop keyboard has a wonky spacebar, knows her dictation software can’t handle her accent. Quirks of the tool.
Same with me. I know my 35mm lens vignettes like crazy when I shoot it wide open. I know my Leica’s focus confirmation is shit in low light (I’m pretty sure this is only because I’ve dropped it numerous times). Facts of the current condition of the instrument. And I use this mechanically magnificent, aesthetically gorgeous yet deeply flawed, imperfect tool to try to express something I’m still struggling to understand.
I capture images for myself. Sketches in a work journal. Visual notes. The only thing these photos document, if they document anything at all, is my own response. My own feelings. When I look back at my work, that’s what I see. Not what happened, but what I felt about what happened. Not the performance, but my experience of the performance.
And this takes time. I don’t rush in and rush out, parachuting in for the shoot and disappearing before the applause dies. It takes time for me to understand anything. To form feelings, attachments, relationships, not just with people, but with the space, the environment, the whole ecology we’re all inhabiting together.
When I collaborate, and that’s what this is, collaboration, not documentation, I usually show up with some general understanding. I’ve read the script (if there is one), imagined how it might manifest. But I learned long ago, probably when I was still Anna Deavere Smith’s production assistant, still young and stupid and full of ideas: preconceived notions are poison. They’re my ideas projected onto someone else’s work. They prevent me from being present. They blind me to what’s actually happening.
Truth comes to me little by little. Sometimes suddenly, yeah, there are flashes. But mostly it’s gradual. An accumulation. A slow burn. Truth is temporal. It shifts. What was true yesterday might not be true tomorrow. José Esteban Muñoz reminds us that queerness itself is a horizon, a thing glimpsed but never fully reached. Performance truth feels the same: fugitive, atmospheric, always slipping through your fingers.
Those sudden moments of truth? They only happen when I know the collaborators. When I’ve breathed with them over time. When there’s trust. Judith Butler writes that vulnerability isn’t a private condition, it’s relational. We’re vulnerable to each other. We’re interdependent. Truth requires that interdependence.
When we reach that place, the images become something more than personal sketches. They capture some semblance of truth in the performance. Not the truth. I don’t believe in a singular truth. But a truth. Something honest. Something that feels real.
Bert O. States argues that theater’s power lies in its doubleness: the real body and the fictional body occupying the same space. Photography threatens to collapse that, to freeze it into a single plane. Henri Cartier-Bresson thought there was a decisive moment where form and content aligned, but I think the decisive moment isn’t found, it’s cultivated through relationship, presence, and exposure to risk.
Then there’s Gordon Parks, who said he used his camera as a weapon against everything he hated about America: poverty, racism, discrimination. I think about that constantly. The idea that the camera can harm or heal depending on the hand that holds it. That a weapon can also be a way of making space for someone else’s humanity. That the violence of the image isn’t inevitable, it’s a matter of intention, trust, and care.
For me, it all comes down to trust. The ability to capture anything resembling truth depends entirely on trust. The game of yes. You open yourself up to another person. You make yourself defenseless. You surrender.
Joyce understood this in the last lines of Ulysses. Molly Bloom’s endless affirmation. Yes as surrender. Yes as recognition. Yes as trust.
“…I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. “aJames Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 edition
That’s the only condition under which I see anything approaching truth. Not facts. Not documentation. But truth. Whatever the hell that means.
And maybe it means nothing. Maybe I’m full of shit. Maybe all of this, the theory, the philosophy, the carefully constructed rationale, is just justification for something I do because I can’t help myself. Because I need to. Because it’s the only way I know how to be in the world.
But I don’t think so. I think there’s something here. Something worth pursuing. Something that matters, even if I can’t articulate it fully. Even if I’m still, after all these years, struggling to understand.
That struggle. That not knowing. That perpetual searching. That’s the only honest position I know.
Works Cited
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1967, pp. 9–16.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. Verve, 1952.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
Parks, Gordon. A Choice of Weapons. Harper & Row, 1966.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. University of California Press, 1985.
References