Documentary and portrait photographer — Dakar, New York, and long assignments in between
I photograph people where they live and work, usually over weeks rather than hours. My long-form documentary work has run in magazines and hung in three gallery shows, and the portrait commissions pay for the months when a story is not finished. I shoot mostly on medium format and available light. I do not light a room I have not spent time in, and I do not photograph anyone I have not talked to first — which is slower and is the entire method. The pictures people remember from my work are almost never the first day. I teach one workshop a year in Dakar, ten people, and I sell prints from the archive because the negatives should not only live in a box.
Amara came back from Saint-Louis with a story that was not the one we commissioned and was obviously the better one. We ran twenty-two pages. She had spent five of the seven weeks not photographing.
Hélène Marchand
Photo editor, international magazine
Archival pigment print, 40×50 cm, printed and signed here. Twenty-five only, numbered on the reverse, shipped flat in a museum box. Ships worldwide within ten days.
Any frame from the published story, archival pigment on cotton rag, 30×40 cm. Open edition, signed, shipped rolled. Tell me the frame number when you order.
Five days, ten people. We work your own long story rather than exercises: how to spend the first week without a camera, how to sequence forty frames into something that means one thing, and how to edit out the picture you are proudest of. Once a year.
