In Conversation: With Photography and Life, Joe Greer Takes the Long View

There’s an instant timelessness to your photos. The moment you see them, you have the sense that they’re destined for the history books. I think that’s a huge part of the emotional resonance they have with your audience. I’m curious to hear how you’d deconstruct the elements of a great photo. Or looking at it from another angle, what goes through your mind before you decide to release the shutter?

I think it’s a beautiful medley of a few things. It starts and finishes with an understanding of how light works. Good light is obviously what’s going to make a great photo, but also the lack of light, low light, understanding artificial light, bringing in a flash… we don’t just have to shoot at 6pm golden hour or just a sunrise. I like to shoot in harsh light, and I think film renders very beautifully in that midday sun. A lot of photographers run away from it. Understanding light across several different avenues and how to harness that is going to take you so far in this game. Recognizing when there’s not a lot of available light – how can you still evoke emotion or create a sense of movement or balance within a frame?

Then that bleeds into composition. That is one thing I’m always looking for: how to fill a frame, how to get purpose to all four corners, how to recognize when to allow a photograph room to breathe? You don’t need to always try to fit things in. Space is good, [as is] knowing where to put your subject in a frame. Those compositional elements have taken me years to understand, but now that I’ve been doing this for almost a decade, it has become very natural. I don’t think, “I’ve got to compose it this way.” It’s just like, “Oh, this feels balanced. This feels good.” In the beginning, it was very tactile and I was very robotic about it. I made a lot of bad photographs, thinking the composition was right and it was absolute garbage. A beautiful part of the process was learning how to be mobile – when to step back, when you press into a scene, what focal length you’re choosing to use.

Another thing is color. There are so many times where color bypasses light and composition and it’s the first thing I notice. I’ll see a combination of colors – of individuals, whether it’s apparel, a color around them, or a group of people in a frame who don’t belong together. And it’s just this rich, full, attractive collection of colors that I haven’t seen before in a scene. That’ll just bring me in and then I work backwards. What’s the composition here? What do I need to get closer? Am I good here, are they going to come to me, can I position my body in a way to allow them to step into a space that fills the frame? Then movement. Anytime you can create movement with a still, 2D image, it’s powerful. Whether that’s a slow shutter, an object moving quickly across your frame, whether it’s at a 30th of a second and you get some motion blur or it’s tack sharp but you can feel that momentum and it’s still photograph – that is so hard to do. There are times where I nail it and there are times where I miss it. But chasing that has been so rewarding because that’s such a powerful, emotive quality about a still photograph.

The last one for me is how to evoke a sense of emotion. And this question I’ve been answering through the lens of street [photography]: being able to evoke emotion with a group of strangers that you do not know is another thing that is very hard to do. It takes a lot of work, a lot of practice and a lot of conquering your fears of stepping into somebody’s space. [It’s about] being able to insert yourself comfortably, confidently, into a scene to make a photograph when you feel something is there – you feel the weight, you feel the passion, you feel the angst, you feel that the love, the mystery, whatever the emotion is. That’s why I love the streets so much. On any day you have no idea what kind of things you’re going to encounter.

I think those are the things that allow [a photo] to be timeless. Thirty years from now, someone who’s not born yet will be able to look at a photo that I made in the early 2020s, and they’re going to recognize these natural human conditions that we have – like movement, like emotion, like light – and it’s going to feel familiar, even though it’s three decades old.