Beyond Pretty Pictures

What is a good photograph? There may be as many answers as there are photographers. Despite the plethora of opinions, most answers include an essential standard-does the photograph have a message? That is, does it have meaning? You can easily recognize photos with meaning-they are the ones that inspire that "aha" moment of sudden understanding; they are the images that you remember weeks, even years, later.

"Aha" moments are common as you browse images by Paul Liebhardt, professional documentary photographer and part-time professor at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif. An inveterate vagabond, Liebhardt often documents his travels in photography books, including Odyssey: Tales of the Universe (1991) and (1997). Through Liebhardt's images, viewers glimpse a uniquely personal and profound insight into the people and cultures that comprise his 20-year portfolio of global adventures.

How to infuse an image with meaning is the question Liebhardt is asked most often. Despite years of teaching and conducting workshops, Liebhardt has no quick, hip-pocket answer. As he searches for one or two sentences that will hold the answer, he mentions time, details, seeing beyond the surface, relationships, metaphors, and epiphanies. Eventually, an answer emerges: you have to spend time getting to know and building relationships with the people and places you're photographing. Then you have to infuse the image with your knowledge and understanding of the people and place.

When you can do that, according to Liebhardt, you have an image that "reveals something rather than just shows something." Implementing the elements of Liebhardt's answer cannot be done easily or quickly. But then, few images match the understanding and empathy captured by his work. While the silent, intuitive creative process necessarily drives much of Liebhardt's photography, he has spent more than 20 years guiding students toward creating their own meaningful and metaphoric images.

Without hesitation, Liebhardt says the key is spending time with the people you're photographing. "You have to develop a relationship with them [which means] being very real, never hiding your camera, and never sneaking pictures." The length of time required for knowing or understanding a subject and locale varies. "I've spent weeks and weeks in villages," the photographer says, and, in his documentary courses at Brooks, he often spends several months in a locale. "You can keep going back and spending more and more time with the same group of people or the same place or location at the same time of day every day for two or three weeks so you get the same scene but different light," he continues. "To me, that is essential."

Liebhardt uses a Contax RX camera and Carl Zeiss lenses (Liebhardt's images are featured in Contax advertisements). Liebhardt most often uses Kodachrome 64, a film he knows is not often used by many photographers. Despite its near vintage status, Liebhardt uses Kodachrome 64 as the standard by which he measures all other film. "It is sharp, offers the most accurate rendition of color," and, he notes, is rated very accurately. His second choice is Kodachrome 200.

Liebhardt says he never uses a tripod, a flash, or a light meter, either hand-held or built-in. "I've used the same film for so long and know it so well that I just know what the exposure is," he says.

When he's working on building relationships, Liebhardt isn't deterred by cultural differences, such as language. Although Liebhardt has been around the world no fewer than 10 times, he speaks no foreign languages. But whether he's in China, West Africa, Vietnam, or Guatemala, Liebhardt does not find language to be a barrier. "People understand what you want and what you need, and vice versa," he explains. The bigger challenge, according to the photographer, is establishing a relationship of trust.

To gain trust, Liebhardt relies on sincerity. Sincerity means "being very real with people," he says. "If your way of acting and interacting comes across as real-not forced and not phony-then you can get people to trust you," he explains. He also relies on humor. But Liebhardt says he doesn't ask people to smile for the camera, and he doesn't tell jokes; instead, Liebhardt says, "I try to make people sincerely laugh."

And when you gain trust, anything is possible. "Once you are considered okay-they know that you're not using them for any reason-then you can do anything." Liebhardt finds that he can disappear into the background and spend hours with people in their homes. "I never give anyone any money," he adds, but he often returns to give people photographs he's taken of them. "Once you do that, you could be mayor of the village," he says.

Liebhardt cautions that close attention to every detail counts when he's building trust with others. From experience, he's learned that the clothes you wear and the equipment and accessories you carry can help or hinder your quest to blend into the surroundings. In short, Liebhardt doesn't look like a tourist. And, he adds, "I don't look like a rich American." He continues, "I have an old, beat-up camera bag and old, beat-up cameras that don't look like much would be lost if they were left there." His unassuming appearance makes it easier to "be one of them."

Liebhardt may travel thousands of miles to a destination, but when he gets there he often doesn't go far. Rather than hopping around to see as much of the country as he can, he focuses on seeing what there is to see. "Seeing and photography are synonymous," the Brooks professor says. "The art of photography is the art of seeing-there is no difference. And it's not so much what you see, but how you see it."

His approach is exactly opposite that of most tourists. Liebhardt uses the example of a tourist traveling to India to see the Taj Mahal. "They take the sunset picture of the Taj Mahal, and they leave. They never walk the streets of Agra, and few of them ever get away from the Sheraton Hotel or the tour bus that takes them to the Taj Mahal every morning and to the airport. And when they leave, they have a picture of the Taj Mahal, but they have seen nothing of India."

By contrast, a serious photographer "will go to really see something," Liebhardt continues. For a photographer, "the most interesting thing to see might be on the way to the Taj Mahal, or it might be at the airport, and [the photographer] may never get to the Taj Mahal."

Even when you've built a relationship with the people you're photographing, there's still the question of knowing when you've got a good shot. Liebhardt counters, "You know when to press the shutter when it's a good picture-so the real question is what is a good picture?"

The answer is that a good photograph is often a metaphor-an image that makes you think of something else you've seen or felt. To create a metaphor, Liebhardt creates a relationship in the photo. The relationship can be established by including a detail in the foreground, background, or with the subject. "If there is something in the picture-little things, no matter where they are-they can set the picture off," he explains.

It's often those details that inspire the viewer's epiphany-the sudden realization that they understand the meaning in the photograph. The word epiphany doesn't appear in photo textbooks, Liebhardt acknowledges, but he knows that this realization is part of what makes memorable pictures memorable. Liebhardt himself was inspired to become a professional photographer by many of the dramatic news images published during the Vietnam war. "It goes back to really seeing beyond the surface of things," he says. "You have to give the viewer something that he sees that makes him understand it all."

For more information about photography courses, visit Brooks Institute of Photography.

In photography classes, Liebhardt says it is easy for photography students to become too focused on mastering technical details of the medium. "Students often make wonderful prints, gorgeous black-and-white images that are technically perfect," Liebhardt says. "They show it to me and say, 'Isn't this beautiful?' The image they made in the darkroom is technically perfect. They have used the medium really well, but there is zero message-there is nothing there."

Liebhardt believes that many students take courses because they lack one thing: self-confidence. Despite having spent much of his professional career as a photography instructor, Liebhardt dispenses unorthodox advice in the classroom: "I tell students right away that if I were them I'd go and get my money back and not take this course. I would take whatever money they spent and just buy film and shoot."

For every person who aspires to professional photographer status, Liebhardt has a reassuring message. "You don't need a license to be a professional photographer. Nike's got it right: you just go do it. And you keep working at it. It's like being a sculptor. Some days you've got this big rock in front of you, and you chip away at it. Some days you don't make much progress, and some days the progress is huge. But if you work at it every day, over time, something forms and you've got something. This is very much true with a photographer. If you keep at it and do what you do best, things usually work out. It sounds almost too easy, but I believe it's true."

Becoming a professional photographer is what Paul Liebhardt calls his "career adjustment." Liebhardt, a native of Rochester, N.Y., graduated with a degree in liberal arts from St. Lawrence University in Syracuse, and went on to earn a master's degree in political science in the early 1960s. When NASA came to the campus on a recruiting mission, Liebhardt signed up thinking he would "help out a little bit" with the Kennedy-era space effort.

Ten years later, after negotiating contracts for gear on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecrafts, and after the successful moon landing, Liebhardt concluded that since all "the good stuff was done," it was time to do something totally different.

"I got very interested in the power of all the still pictures that came out of the [Vietnam] War during 1972-74," Liebhardt recalls. In 1973, he retired his business suits and moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. He took a "few courses" at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, and began working for himself.

By 1978, the Institute for Shipboard Education, sponsored at that time by the University of Colorado, hired him to do their public relations photography. Within a year, they asked him to teach photography for their Semester at Sea program. Three books, 10 years, and 10 trips around the world later, Liebhardt switched gears slightly. In January 1988, he joined the full-time faculty at Brooks Institute, one of the best photography schools in the nation, teaching photojournalism and documentary photography classes. Liebhardt continues to teach documentary photography part-time at Brooks Institute. Today, he has approximately 100,000 images in his portfolio, and he adds an average of 5,000 new images each year.