Patterns of a Lost World: Frame 4,167

©National Geographic Society

St. Kilda is haunting. Everywhere you look there are patterns of a lost life. I came here for frame number 4,167.

This tiny group of islands 40 miles beyond the last of the Outer Hebrides is more than remote. It is almost alien. In spite of that, people lived there, subsisting mostly on sea birds and nearly wild sheep. When famine threatened, the cluster of St. Kildans summoned help in the only way they could -- with a message in a bottle set adrift in the wild seas.

Finally, battered by disease and crop failures, St. Kilda's  population dwindled to 36 in 1930. That's when the islanders asked the British government to take them off the island. That was August 29, 1930 --  the day when two millennia of occupation came to an end. There are stories that some of the islanders went into their houses for the last time, opened the family bible to Exodus, left it on the kitchen table, and walked away.

In so many ways I was lucky to see St. Kilda. Angus Campbell had brought me out with his load of day trippers and promised to pick me up later in the week. It was a beautiful day but Angus warned me:  "Take advantage of this good weather. It's not going last."

And it didn't.  By that evening it was raining hard. It rained for four days as I tried to eke out images in the murky light.  I stood for hours in driving rain, waiting for glimpses of the sweeping bay.

The generous staff of The National Trust who were stationed on the island took care of me, keeping track of my expeditions into the gloom so that they might come looking if I didn't come back. I had plenty of time to imagine the life of an islander living on a stormy outpost. The thought lost its romantic appeal very quickly.

By the end of the week, it was doubtful that Angus could make it back to St, Kilda to pick me up as scheduled, and I was resigning myself to being there for awhile. But slowly the plain slate skies curdled into patches of light and dark.  With this promise of light came another message from Angus.  He was coming but he couldn't delay the trip back; I'd have to be ready to get off the island.  Given the timing and relative break in the weather,  I sprinted with my cameras up to the Gap, the high ridge above the village.  On one side of the Gap I could look down over the sweep of the bay.  On the other, another step would have sent me tumbling over some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe.  From my perch I could see Boreray four miles away, trailing a cloud more than a mile long.

And then my time was up.  I clambered down.  Along the way I shot this picture, frame 4,167. It was almost an afterthought.

- - -

Months later I was in Washington editing the story when I came across this frame.  I passed it by -- again, almost an afterthought.

Thank God for good picture editors like Sarah Leen.  She resurrected the frame and gently and persistently lobbied to get it into the story. She insisted that it spoke of the harsh landscape the islanders of St. Kilda had made their home for centuries. The stonework circling their fields was the sign of enduring hardships.  In the dots of wee stone huts and dashes of abandoned houses Sarah perceived the message of a lost world.

She was right. What obscured the image in my eyes was the ease and haste with which it had been taken.  Coming after a week of soaking rain and wet cameras it had seemed a rather facile picture.  But it spoke of the lives of St. Kildans -- a great visual aspect and haunting story of human endurance on these most rugged of islands.

Jim

Tomorrow: Inside Fingal's Cave

You can see pictures from the article and more on the National Geographic web site, here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/hebrides/richardson-photography

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

Comments

[JAL]

> Thank God for good picture editors...

Interesting - a recurring theme in your posts is how you need someone else to review your photos and help pull out good ones that got missed. Should we all be recruiting others to help with the process. How many great photos never got seen because the photographer didn't think it was up to much.

[Jim Richardson]

JAL, thanks for your comment. Interesting that you picked up on that theme.

In general, yes, we should all be recruiting others to help with the process. If you think of photographs as messages and communications (as opposed to just beautiful pieces of artwork) then it's incredibly helpful to show them to others. Then you get to see if the viewer is getting the message the photographer thinks is there in the picture. We all need some trusted sources to tell us when a picture really works (for them) and when we're just blowing smoke and don't know it.

I've seen this happen up and down the whole spectrum of photographers, from rank amateurs to absolute masters. Sometimes photographers want to show me their pictures to some exotic location. They went to on this trip and got "a lot of really great pictures. Just incredible images." They didn't. I have to tell them that.

I once got to see the full take on W. Eugene Smith's Spanish Village. I saw all the various images he printed up from what have become iconic images in the photographic canon. That included that stunning picture of the woman spinning wool, with the graceful line of her pulling the thread. But he printed all kinds of other images of the same scene. He clearly didn't know, at the time, which one was the icon and which ones were the also-rans. He was working through it. He was feeling his way along, sorting it all out over time.

That's the way it should be.

The second point, in this case, is that we were picking pictures FOR THIS LAYOUT. There may have been other pictures from my St. Kilda take that were better pictures. That's not what we were looking for. For example, we already knew that we were going to use the picture of the birds flying out from Boreray that appears in a later spread. Therefore, we would not pick a picture of birds and cliffs from St. Kilda, not matter how good it was! We were looking for the right picture that carried the right message for the task at hand -- in that part of the total layout.

Believe me, a whole lot of very good pictures drop out of the selection process when you look at it that way. Each time you pick one picture a lot of other pictures automatically get eliminated. Just the way it goes.

Bottom line: getting people to look at pictures and tell you what they see is incredibly important. It's a proven antidote to hubris.

Sorry to go on for so long here but you have brought up a very important point. Thanks,

Jim

[Luca Baldassarre]

Thank you for sharing these editing experiences. For me, and I hope for many others, I think it will be enormously valuable if you could write a post about the editing procedure at NG and other magazines you've worked for.

[Jordi Busqué]

I'm also very interested to know all you have to say about editing process. I once got an story edited by a NG editor and was a really, really interesting experience. Good editors should write books about that. There are many of us who will be very happy to know all they have to say.

[JAL]

Many thanks Jim, very interesting.

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