‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes’   – Roland Barthes

   We had our first day of shooting recently, and the 3,846 photos that detail every movement of every person involved chronicles a few chaotic hours of probing a stranger’s life. We asked a child prodigy to delve into what makes him an artist and what makes good art. We roused him from sleep and watched him eat breakfast. It seems like there’s a lot of subtlety required in waltzing into someone’s house and asking personal questions without making them feel uncomfortable. You’re taking pictures of their books and trash and their pajamas under the framework of being a professional that they can trust. It’s an intimate pressure, knowing you’ve been let into someone’s life with a camera. Especially when your subject is a kid. Sticking your camera in a stranger’s face and asking them personal questions has higher stakes when the character you’re profiling is in development and might be fragile. Most people shudder to have their baby pictures exposed by well-intentioned parents, but having a recording on the internet of your thoughts on life as a teenager has the potential for disaster down the road. It’s not that you have to be oversensitive as a documentarian, but it’s maybe something to be conscious of.
   I was struck by the feeling that, in examining this kid, I might not want to show too much familial drama or show a dirty room in too much light. We were witnessing an illustration prodigy suddenly outgrow the style he had gotten famous for. The pressure to continue making the same kind of work is enough to infuriate mature artists but must weigh so heavily on the creativity of a kid. His publishers want nothing to do with his new work, but he is apparently unable to stop drawing. He’s unable to derail his changing vision or style. His earnestness is cause for alarm and fascination, but that kind of character development is difficult to record sensitively.
   The process of making a subject comfortable enough to ignore a camera seemed to rely on, in this case, the subject being involved in his work so fully that he forgot to act like he was being filmed. Or maybe I couldn’t tell that the social facade was still there. My problem might be my inability to pinpoint what’s happening in the exact moment that it’s happening. Translation after an exchange adds a lag time to my personal understanding of the situation, but in a way, it has the potential to illuminate a more guarded response. People are often, and especially in a close-up, saying what they mean to say with their eyes and tone. It’s a complicated process, and to be one step out of the loop means you might be five steps behind. I’m hoping to pick up the pace language-wise so I don’t exhaust everyone translating around me. I’ve got a lot to catch up on. It’s an exciting field to be exploring, and the stories we’re planning on covering are diverse and urgent.