“Tom Price is a documentary photographer, writer and filmmaker, currently based in London, UK. In style and process, he blends documentary photography with environmental portraiture. He shoots and edit short films, and can write everything from snappy captions to articles, to longer context-rich trip reports.”
When I started working as a professional photographer, around five years ago, I felt that I was somehow trespassing into the world of pictures. During the previous five years of undergrad and postgrad work in languages, all my time had been spent soaking in words. It was stitched into my identity. I felt called to images and photographs like a vocation, but really I was out of my depth.
Since then, I’ve spent the last few years intensely learning, honing and practicing photography. Figuring out the craft, the industry and my voice took up almost all of my energy, and words ended up falling by the wayside, neglected.
After work one day, almost two years ago, my wife told me that she had the opportunity to go to India to work in a palliative care center in a cancer hospital in Kolkata. I’d lived abroad a couple of times, but we’d never done this together, nor for such a long period of time. We chewed it over for a few weeks, and then I broke the news to my colleagues at the brilliant NGO I was working for. We were doing it – it was too good a chance pass up.
Friends began to ask if we were going to keep a blog, but generally I can’t stand these sorts of things – I don’t even read my best friend’s tour blog, and it’s really good. But this got me thinking. Perhaps this was the chance to address my ache to write. At least to give it a go – I wasn’t sure that I could do it at all in real life.
Text and an image, the relationship between the two can be straightforward, complicated or totally unrelated, but either way – you get both together.
The idea sort of fell into my lap. I was on assignment in Brazil and was doing what I always do when away from home – writing a postcard. I’m a big postcard fan. I love getting them, but I really love sending them. Little missals, private, but also sort of public – the postman and your neighbor could easily read them. Text and an image, the relationship between the two can be straightforward, complicated or totally unrelated, but either way – you get both together. And there it hit me, I would make a series of sort-of-postcards. One picture, one story, once a week, delivered to the internet’s equivalent of your postbox.
Fast-forward a few months and it’s fair to say that my Fifty Frames postcard series stretches the medium a bit. While I don’t write them directly to one person, I send them using MailChimp’s TinyLetter [no sponsorship is in play for this link], which feels small and personal in a similar way to writing a postcard. Breaking free of the postcard’s physical limits has also allowed me to write a bit more. As a result, they’ve ended up varying a fair bit, and one has even been a poem.
In the end though, it was limits that really helped me start writing again. Before this, I felt like I’d lost something. Maybe confidence, a subject, an outlet, perhaps just the permission to write. Yet, having to come up with an image and a story once a week and send it out, gave me the structure I needed. And a deadline really helps me to make it happen.
We’ve had some amazing experiences during our time here, and there have been an abundance of stories to choose from. Fascinating moments ranging from the mundane, the boring and the everyday, through to snake attacks, skyscraper climbs, vibrant festivals and wonders of the world have presented me with more material than I can handle. But filtering and focusing, also deeply integral to the practice of photography, has been part of the joy and struggle of having a go at postcard storytelling.
I’ll be the first to admit that they’re not all fantastically told tales. But I think they’ve got better as time has gone on. I’ve had some really lovely messages and comments from friends, family and strangers (which is the weirdest part), but most of all I’ve felt something re-awaken inside of me. I’ve learnt to see and savour the world a little bit more deeply.
Before I started this little project, I think I secretly spent most of my time thinking that all the exciting things happened elsewhere, that a ‘story’ only happened to people who live their lives in series of unattainable adventures. But if Fifty Frames has taught me anything, it’s that when you practice seeing the world a little more closely, wonderful stories start appearing everywhere.
