Speaking of find­ing food & earn­ing a liv­ing, pho­tog­ra­phers today are becom­ing more cre­ative in get­ting more money-generating work, doc­u­men­tar­i­ans are doing com­mer­cial work on the side, and many com­mer­cial shoot­ers are doing doc­u­men­tary when time allows it.

Photojournalists and doc­u­men­tar­i­ans often depend on sci­en­tific or social grants beside their fixed or assignment-based income, it’s pretty much like a pitch­ing con­test with com­mer­cial clients but you com­pete with a slightly dif­fer­ent agenda, in com­mer­cial terms, the client’s for­mula is to award the best port­fo­lio with the best price, while grants are being rewarded by your aca­d­e­mic or sci­en­tific cre­den­tials, rel­e­vance and some­times, inside con­nec­tion. Both are highly reward­ing, more to the lat­ter, cre­atively per­haps, but also very competitive.

But now more and more grants also depend on cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship which means a shift in their pri­or­i­ties, no longer a project can be purely aca­d­e­m­i­cal or sci­en­tific, but also com­mer­cial pri­or­i­ties are in play.

A good pho­tog­ra­pher gets a grant and win projects, but a smart one not only win con­tracts or secure a series of grants, but also has the capac­ity to improvize, evolve and maneu­ver them­selves in the process. Like James Morgan & his Bajau Laut project:

Initially Morgan’s intent was to approach the project as an ethno­graphic study. In 2009, he applied for the Royal Photographic Society’s Postgraduate Bursary award, and won it. It pro­vided him with about $5,500. “I had all this money and sup­port, but I had no idea how I would find the Bajau Laut peo­ple,” he says.

The Bajau peo­ple are that of the Borneo region, migrated from the north­ern part of the east-west pacific region to the north­ern tip of the Indonesian Archipelago, mainly around the coastal lines of the Kalimantan and the Sulawesi islands, but also spreads to the Southeastern Sumatera, the Riau islands as well as west­ern Papua. Though they may come from dif­fer­ent tribes with dif­fer­ent names, it is believe that they are part of the Bajau tribes from the south­ern Phillippines and are some of the world’s last remaind­ing sea tribes.

Like us islanders, they work, live and grow in their own habi­tat — the sea, so they adapt and evolve:

“Part of my inter­est in the project,” Morgan explains, “was the free-diving aspect. When marine mam­mals hold their breath for a period of time, their heart rates and metab­o­lism slow. That hap­pens to humans, too. I thought that con­nec­tion [between humans and their envi­ron­ment] was inter­est­ing con­cep­tu­ally.” He also wanted to free-dive to con­nect with his sub­jects, and to avoid the has­sle and expense of tak­ing SCUBA gear.

It’s not dif­fi­cult to teach our­selves some­thing, hav­ing the heart to do it is the hard part, I mean Da Vinci taught him­self to write with both of his hands, and simul­ta­ne­ously in both left-to-right and right-to-left direc­tions in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, so how hard can things be, right?

So stud­ied Bahasa Indonesia Morgan did and prac­ticed free-diving¹ in the process and sets off to Sulawesi, not to actu­ally ini­ti­ate his project per se, but for an unre­lated paid assignment:

Morgan spent about six months study­ing the lan­guage and prac­tic­ing free-diving. Then, with an assign­ment from The Guardian to shoot an unre­lated story, Morgan set off for Indonesia with writer Johnny Langenheim (who is also flu­ent in the lan­guage.) Once they fin­ished work for The Guardian, they set out for a Bajau Laut stilt set­tle­ment on Sulawesi, Indonesia.

And that my friend is the heart of the matter.

Photography is 90% about get­ting the job and 10% about exe­cut­ing it — these milage may vary — but with­out a sus­tain­able work and income, a pho­tog­ra­pher is just a man with the camera.

Photographers are also keen observers, they are also sur­vivors, sur­vivors who are keen to obser­va­tion evolve, and those who evolve adapt, they improvize to make the best out of the worst sit­u­a­tion. It’s not only in the field, but also behi­ind the desk, in deal­ing with clients. The truth is there is not enough per­fect assign­ments to sat­isfy a shooter’s soul & pocket, we just need to find the threads and tie the knots to make a stronger rope.

On the other hand there are issues about ethics:

It isn’t unusual for pho­to­jour­nal­ists to seek alter­na­tive sources of fund­ing for their projects, now that pub­lish­ers won’t (or can’t) sup­port them. But turn­ing to sub­jects for finan­cial sup­port for a doc­u­men­tary project raises obvi­ous eth­i­cal questions. […]

There’s always two sides of every story.

The writer of the story raised some good points, but the eth­i­cal con­cern is not about James and his pub­lisher, but rather James and his client. It’s not impos­si­ble to shoot two projects in one place, trained well, many pho­tog­ra­pher can come up as win­ners, but many also fails to main­tain a clean and trans­par­ent record doing so, the key is not to raise con­flict but to avoid them — find the threads and tie the knots to make a stronger rope so you can tow another boat while you row one.

The real ques­tion is why most pub­lish­ers fail to com­mit to a story, men­tal sup­port is triv­ial com­pared to the finan­cial under­tak­ing and we won’t be talk­ing about this if there’s enough money on the table, but there isn’t.

To say that James is a real win­ner is an over­state­ment, but he showed us what can be done to weather the storm and to come out as a win­ner. And that’s just a story amongst the thou­sands of win­ners out there.

Turned out nomadic is our nature, after all, we no longer skip places much, but we do skip from one pri­or­ity to another, one story to the next, and that’s how we grow.

Further view­ing:

The Bajau Laut by James Morgan