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Unlike most people whose first experience with photography takes place in a classroom, Finlay’s introduction to the camera took place in Ireland, face-to- face with the barrel of a soldier’s gun. This incident occurred when he visited Europe for the first time after graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1987. His grandparents, who were from Ireland, heartily encouraged him to visit his roots in Belfast and Ballymena— “At my grandmother’s insistence, they told me that I should really know where I’ve come from.” He took a train to northern Ireland with a friend and went to the Europa Hotel in Belfast for a cup of tea, “which had 15-foot-high barbed wire across it and two sets of radar machines you had to pass through to get in.” Finlay and his friend left for the train station bound for Dublin, and he recalls feeling a lot of emptiness in the streets. He had also brought his father’s camera with five rolls of film (“I figured that one roll a month would be fine for me”). This camera was hanging around his neck when several British soldiers drove by in a military Land Rover vehicle. “One of the soldiers got out of the back, and put me in the sight of his rifle, looking directly at me through his scope. I looked through the viewfinder to photograph him looking at me, and my friend ran off, thinking I was completely crazy,” Finlay relates. Fortunately, he survived the incident. After he returned to the U.S. and tried to get his film processed, he discovered that the film leader hadn’t caught onto the spool, resulting in a completely blank roll. Although he was disappointed, a creative seed had been planted.
He took a detour into the corporate world after this, selling photocopiers and training the sales staff at the 3M Corporation. Finlay recalls that he enjoyed teaching so much that he left his job and got an emergency teaching credential. He became a substitute teacher in the school district he had grown up in Palos Verdes, California, and debated going back to school for his masters degree. But he wanted to find his passion first. “I didn’t just want to teach something—I wanted to find whatever it was that truly set my soul on fire, to not only teach, but to inspire my students,” he says. Just a couple of months later, the movie, “Dances with Wolves” was released, and Finlay related to the journals that Kevin Costner’s character kept, which reflected his life and experiences. “I decided that this is what I wanted to do; to tell the stories of the human condition.” He asked himself what he wanted to photograph and what types of stories he could tell, and flashed back on how he felt on the streets of Belfast. “So I found myself back on those streets again just two years later,” he says. “I did some research and found that Falls Road was one of two places where the whole struggle of northern Ireland began. For me, it was the epicenter of that whole movement.” He went back to the Europa Hotel, and walked up Falls Road every day. “One boy just wound up finding me,” he says. “Patrick McGagy was his name, and I found out from one of his cousins that his father had been arrested for stabbing a man who had assaulted Patrick’s mother. He was just nine years old when he approached me and started bumming money, cigarettes or alcohol—or preferably, all three.” Finlay and the boy established a rapport. “I told him I wanted to hang out with him and find out how he lived his life, what his struggle was all about and what it was like living on Falls Road. So he accepted me into his life and I spent some time with him and his guns, and took a bunch of lousy photographs of course, because I knew nothing about photography.” As he’s said in his new book, Testify, “At that time, I knew more about sewer holes then I knew about apertures.”
When he came home, he got his film processed with disappointing results. “Everything I took was with a 100mm lens, and my photos didn’t translate what was going on over there,” he states. “Everything was flat and one-dimensional.” Then he traded in his 100mm lens for a 24mm and decided that was the one lens he needed to go back with and learn his craft. “This will force me to get in close and get immersed in their lives,” he decided. This wide-angle, close-up view has since become part of Finlay’s signature style. Generally he prefers fixed focal-length lenses to zooms, a belief he teaches to students at workshops and seminars. “With a zoom lens, you’re standing in one place and ratcheting the lens back and forth. You have to make hundreds of choices as to which is the best focal length,” he says. “I think when you change your perspective—moving left to right, crouching or pushing in close, whatever the case may be—I think the lens and your eye become one and the same.” He’s also shot tens of thousands of photos with a 35mm f/1.4 and says that even before he brings the camera to his eye, he knows what type of coverage he’ll have through the lens. When doing photojournalism, he often shoots with two camera bodies, using a 28mm lens on one and a 35mm lens on the other. He uses a Canon 1DS Mark II lately, along with Canon EF lenses, 35mm f/1.4L, 50mm f/1.2L, 24mm f/1.4L, and occasionally a tilt-shift lens. But he maintains, “the 35mm f/1.4L is how I see the world.” Although his work is largely digital, he still shoots film, and feels strongly that some people spend too much time making digital imaging look like film. “I always wonder why I have to do all these steps. If it’s supposed to look like film, then I should be shooting film.”
Finlay has won several prestigious “Picture of the Year” awards, including one last year for Best Book of the Year for Testify, a collection of some of the photo essays that Finlay has worked on since 1989. “For me, it was a way of going back through my catalogue of images to find the thread that ties them together,” he comments. His first book in 1996, The Unheard Voice—Portraits of Childhood, featured a series of photographs of children dealing with growing up in difficult environments like Bosnia, Rwanda or Romania, while his third book, Journeymen, dealt with disappearing traditions around the world. A book about the climates of Africa and Antarctica has just been sent to his publisher. He has done over 40 major advertising campaigns, in which he lends his style as a documentary photographer “when clients want something that looks a lot more real, less staged.” He says he’s not one to manipulate a situation too heavily. “It’s also a stretch for me as a photographer,” he notes. “It’s about as far from Rwanda as I can get, when they shut down the streets of Los Angeles so I can shoot a car ad campaign.” He’s juggling a number of different projects currently, like going to the Microsoft Summit, then doing a two-day ad campaign for Pac Sun before flying to West Virginia to shoot for Vanity Fair. “I’m always cross-threading advertising and commissioned work with photojournalism,” he explains. His commercial clients include Kodak, Microsoft, Grey Advertising, Chiat Day, Ocean Pacific, Fuji, Samsung, Everlast, Sony and Warner Brothers Pictures. His work is also represented by Fahey-Klein Galleries. Last year, he toured extensively with Adobe Systems, as they introduced the Lightroom beta via workshops at the top 25 schools around the country. You can learn more about this tour and view projects that the students participated in by visiting http://projectphotoshoplightroom.com.
Currently, he’s committed to doing various stories about mankind’s cause and effect on our fragile eco-system. “About seven or eight of the 20 stories have already been completed,” Finlay says. “I’ll probably do another five of them in the next few months.” He’s working on this project with several corporations, and museum and gallery showings are being planned. “It’s a story that I’m very driven to tell,” he states. “There’s some pretty scary statistics out there about what’s going to be happening in future decades. It’s getting drier in Central and South America. There’s less rain, which is causing them to use more chemicals. There may be a hundred million ‘environmental refugees’ crossing our borders by the year 2038.” He’s done some of these projects on his own, while others are in conjunction with the Discovery channel. He’s also partnered with several foundations and corporations, like Amnesty International and the Holocaust Museum, who want to make a difference in the environment—“people who have different ideas and don’t only want them featured in a magazine article for about a week.” The George Eastman House will be putting together a traveling exhibition, and he’ll have a showing at the International Gallery at San Francisco airport, which will reach thousands of people.
Finlay has some big decisions to make when he enters serious situations like war zones with hundreds of bodies strewn about the landscape. “What do I choose to do when I go into a situation like that,” he muses. “Am I going to photograph this and bring this into people’s world? There are a number of different ways to interpret a situation and I choose to focus more on hope than on despair.” One mother of a seven-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old daughter bought several of his photographs to put up in their home to show her children how fortunate they are, and to teach them that there are children in other parts of the world living in difficult situations. “There are a lot of different people looking at your work and deciding how it can work for them,” he says. “I’m very fortunate that people want to use my images, display them, or let them be a part of what they want to communicate.” For all of his achievements, Finlay says he’s just doing the same thing that he’s been doing for the past 17 or 18 years, documenting people’s stories. He wants to do more, and adds, “I don’t want accolades based on the suffering of other people.” To see more of Colin Finlay’s work, visit www.colinfinlay.com. Click Here to See a Gallery of Colin Finlay's Images© Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com |
