Hands Still Tell the Story

We had a field assignment in the photography workshop at Sutter’s Fort one very sunny day one spring.  The assignment was to tell the story of the people who lived and passed through this California Gold Rush provision stop on the way to the gold fields from San Francisco during the 1850’s.  Our objective was to show the detail of the activities as well as the scenes and environment.  Living history docents were there to make our job easy.  Or was it?

A group of women were in the shade catching up on their knitting, an important task when stores weren’t available to provide warm socks.  Full length shots didn’t get the detail of their handiwork.  After several attempts to show the “whole person,”  I decided to use the telephoto to frame the hands at work.  The exercise taught me a valuable lesson that I have practiced many times since when trying to photograph what people were doing.  The craft itself is a big part of the story.  I also made sure she was in even light.  The light created some texture and deminsional shadows, but theydon’t distract or cover her work.

This workshop took place many years ago, before the invention of digital cameras.  All of our work was with slide film, so we could show it in the workshop.  Slide film is quite sensitive to exposure errors and therefore a very unforgiving teacher, and we couldn’t evaluate our results until we got the film back.  Today, I might crop this further, to remove the neck and hat strings and just show the hands.  However, I didn’t do that for this commentary because I wanted to demonstrate that many interpretations are possible.