Visually Documenting Your Local Community

“…you don’t have to travel across the globe to experience new things. Your own backyard is the farthest place away to someone else on the other side of the world.”
~Joey L – Photographer

Having been a photographer since 1987, I have come to realize that visually documenting my local community, the people, places and things that make up where I live and the surrounding region, can be just as interesting, just as compelling as any remote place on our finite planet – especially to someone half way around the world. What it requires is what my mother once said to and of me several years ago and I have never forgotten it:

“You have an insatiable curiosity of the world my dear”

And I honestly believe that’s what drives certain photographers to excel at this kind of work. But I should refine my mothers statement. Although I do live vicariously through other photo colleagues travels to other cultures – like colleague and mentor Larry C. Price, I have no desire to experience the vast majority of those places.

Why?

Two reasons actually.

One, I don’t particularly like airplane travel especially being crammed into a seat with alot of other travelers like in a sardine can and secondly, I have yet to experience all that is available to me even in my home state.

There are those who have what I would term a genetic predisposition to travel. I’m not one of them. But, I will say that I have a great fascination with people I don’t know allowing me visually tell their stories, creating a level of trust and being able to document who they are in still images to create a visual record that can be as compelling as a story being told from a remote country half way around the world.

Just because you aren’t documenting some remote, primitive culture doesn’t mean you can’t create an impact in your images/storytelling. What it does require is a willingness to actually find unique and interesting stories/images that you as a photographer feel should be told.

The images posted here are from a self assigned project I gave myself back in 2017 documenting a local grange halls community square dances they put on every 3 months.

As an old photo dawg, my inspiration for telling these kinds of stories comes from the work of William Albert Allard, a well known National Geographic photographer.

Many less experienced photographers believe they will get their big break by traveling at great personal expense financially to capture images that they believe no one else has created. In the current dump truck mentality of bad to mediocre images that pervades photography today, I have a reality check for you – it’s probably already been done.

Since the pandemic, I have found it almost impossible to go out and find these stories but a small fire has slowly begun to come back to create these kinds of visual stories. I have had to tell myself each day to go out and try to create a compelling story in my own back yard – it will be more difficult, not an easy photo op, yet I have learned more in the process and of my community as a result. I believe it was long time photojournalist David Leeson who said (I’m paraphrasing now) but I’ve never forgotten the essence of the statement:

“It’s easy to go around the world to a war zone to shoot images – they are in front of you all the time. The hard work comes from photographing in your local community.”

I encourage other photographers to consider this perspective. It will change your own world view – at the local level.