Final: Close EncountersObservations on Personal Encounters with Subjects

In some cases, I actually learned some new stories about my subjects and friends, while some I specifically asked to photograph because I already had an idea of some of their personal narratives that would be appropriate for this piece. I also knew beforehand that I wanted to photograph people I was more familiar with because of the potentially invasive nature of the project.
I got the impression from the photo shoots for this project that it was at least somewhat awkward, but I actually think in most cases the audio capture was more awkward than actually shooting photographs for them. I ended up wandering away from them after I'd given direction so that they could take their time to figure out what they wanted to say and give themselves multiple takes if they needed. In general I was regarded as the director. One ended up playing around with the audio capture quite a bit before jumping into explanations; another needed a good five or ten minutes to collect thoughts before recording audio. (I had them record themselves so they could take their time or start over or say as much as they wished.) This wasn't a problem per se, but it was intriguing since I was approaching it from a desire to capture things more so than arrange them to my particular liking. (I felt I already was arranging quite a bit of the experience of this piece in framing them in an interactive web format.) I didn't want to instruct or direct them too strictly from a desire of the portrayal through their portraits to have some kind of personal truth in them, or at least to feel like I was representing them honestly in their essence. (That leaves open the issue of self-portrayal, and the truth one creates of oneself in telling one's own stories, but that is another lengthy topic...)
I think some of the awkwardness, even though it wasn't terribly so, likely came from the focus of the piece itself. Regardless of how self-conscious one is about one's body or how camera shy a person might be, physical oddities, flaws, or scars--and if not that, the stories or associations--tend to be personal and often private matters.
I felt the way in which the subjects of the portraits told their stories was vital in their portrayal (mine and theirs combined.) I hadn't quite expected it, but many of the stories included in the piece were actually humorous on some level, or at least the subjects seemed to look back on the experiences, even if they were bad, with some kind of fondness and good humor. In that way, their voices and their tones while speaking brought so much to the piece, that I would argue is utterly indispensable, and gave greater insight on the subject when composed spatially and temporally with the visual references.