It’s getting a lot of play in communications lately — telling your story.
Rosalia Paganelli
It’s really nothing new, though. The medium of choice since Neanderthal times — storytelling. But what’s it about? What’s storytelling mean?
To me story is connection. As a teller of stories, a maker of stories, it’s not just method, technique, or message, it is connection, it is relationship, it is life.
I’m ruminating on my first days as a visual storyteller — back when I was 16 and just beginning to shoot images with purpose. My hero was, and still is, the late W. Eugene Smith, a Life Magazine photographer and one of the world’s best photo essayists. He connected with people, he documented their stories, he changed lives. I began emulating his documentary style in my image making. One of the aspects of photographing like Smith that moved me most was that it provided me the excuse to talk with people I otherwise had no reason to be with.
Rosalia Paganelli tempered her confident attitude with grace
Rosalia Paganelli returns to my to mind. I rode past her house day after day for months commuting on my bicycle to a summer job. Her house always intrigued me — a run down, ramshackle building encircled by gardens of flowers, herbs and tomatoes instead of lawn, with a dozen Madonnas in the front yard, enshrined in bathtubs turned on end. Who lived there, and why was the house such a strange combination of poverty and worship? I never saw a soul around that building, but longed to.
One day though, I saw her. I immediately stopped to meet Sarah, as she introduced herself, an 84 year old woman from the old country with little English. We spoke a bit, and I returned to photograph her later that week. The lens was the initial basis of our relationship, but I returned days later to show her the photographs.
Sarah enjoyed my photos and I enjoyed her old-country cooking
We soon became friends, and we made photographs together for years. Some were published, many were seen in galleries. I’m not sure that the photographs changed our lives, or others’ in a big way, but for me it cemented the value of putting myself out there, of letting the lens be a way of connecting to people, connecting my inner spiritual and creative life to the world, enabling others to connect as a result.
Perhaps that fed into my ability to strike up conversations anywhere, anytime, with anyone, which later led me to meet wife-to-be in the Rochester Amtrak station. But that’s another story for another time.
