Global Snapshot Tips

by Doug Reilly
The Center for Global Education, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Choosing the Place
In the days leading up to the project date, you should begin thinking about your vantage point. Think about your daily routine and the places you’ve encountered on your wanderings around your program site. Do you visit a lively café every morning? Does your host-mother shop at a busy open market every noontime? Is there an active street corner that you pass every day? A favorite square or plaza to relax in? A neighborhood hang-out (be it pub, bodega, restaurant, pool hall)? A shady park where the old men play Petanque or Bocci, families picnic and lovers rendezvous? The possibilities are endless.

Keep in mind that the place you choose should have several qualities:

1.) It should be lively and busy with local people going about their daily lives.

2.) It should have within it a good vantage point from which to watch and record (this depends on your observing style, see below).

3.) It should be some place that you find fascinating and exciting. The local train station is probably a busy place, but is it interesting to you? Choose something that tickles your interests.

Choosing the Time
The hour of the day you choose is important as well. You are not limited by the project, as long as the hour falls within the Project Date. But consider carefully: is that café empty at 3pm but full at 5pm? While you might not want to choose the busiest time of day (there might be too much going on to record!) you’ll also want to avoid a time where nothing at all is happening. An hour can fly, or tick by second-by-second. Scout out ahead of time.

Safety
Remember to be safe; parks can be fascinating at night, but they may not be the safest place. Some countries have very safe streets and active nighttime street life, others do not. Use your common sense and be safe!

Observational Styles
There are two broadly defined approaches you can take to your observations over the course of your selected hour: participatory and neutral. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and different kinds of people will favor one or the other. Some may be comfortable with both, and may mix styles within their hour.

Participatory observers will collect information by interacting with the scene, talking to café customers or market sellers, striking up conversations with people on park benches or with street performers on the corner or actually taking part in a public activity. Neutral observers will take another tack entirely, setting themselves up at a certain spot where they can eye the action without interfering.

Which style you choose depends on your preference, but also your language ability. If you want to participate you may need to know the local language quite well (although, in the case of a public activity, you might not.) If you don’t have those skills, however, and you still wish to be a more actively involved observer, consider taking a local person who can translate and act as your guide.

Photo Tips
Photography will help you record and communicate your experience of the hour’s events. Keep in mind a few things while taking pictures:

Ask permission: People can be reserved and may not want to be photographed. Others may welcome it. But as the photographer, you should be in the habit of asking permission especially if you’re taking pictures of people close up (as opposed to wide-angle shots of many people in action).

Be sure to tell your subjects, if you are able, about Global Snapshot; they may find it very interesting and open up to you. Even with no common language it’s easy to ask permission: indicate (sometimes pointing is rude) your camera, look at them, shrug quizzically. They’ll get your point. Don’t ask by pointing your camera at someone. It can be interpreted as being a little aggressive.

What to photograph? You’re likely to face many choices. First, we’d suggest a couple of pictures of the location you’ve chosen. Pay attention to the architecture of the place, how the space is divided up for human use. As the hour goes by, watch for picturesque details that emerge. Look at things from different angles. Look for striking color combinations. Since Global Snapshot concentrates on daily life lived by people around the world, that’s what you should concentrate on: photographs of people doing what they do. Portraits of the people you encounter in your hour are okay, but it’s the candid shots—of people going about their daily business and not smiling for the camera—that will contribute most to the project.

    1. Don’t take pictures. Make them.

    1. Don’t preconceive your shooting. Look through your camera’s viewfinder as a way of experimenting with framing the world. How do things “look” through the rectangle? Move around and keep reshaping the picture.

      Avoid cliché seeing. Avoid cliché picture-making. Move in close. Move In Closer. Change angles. Take risks.

    1. -Charles Steckler

Writing Tips
Our Global Snapshot will be built with images and words you supply. Be sure to take notes on what you’re shooting with the camera. Nothing is worse than getting your pictures back and saying “now, what was that guy’s name?” or “What was the name of that place?” Ideally, you should have enough information about the pictures you are taking to write a good photo caption that will underscore, explain or interpret the photograph.

Other than photo notes, you should journal your hour of observations carefully. If you keep a journal regularly, this can be done in the book you usually use (we’ll just ask you to photocopy it for us or transcribe it onto a computer file), or you can use a separate couple of sheets of paper.

Journal-keepers can take a variety of approaches to their work. The writing can be introspective, including not only a discussion of what you see, but also of how it makes you feel, how you are effected by the scene before you. The writing can be analytical, trying to get at the relationships underlying the social interaction you are observing. The writing can be humorous or serious, direct or metaphorical.

Getting Started:
Make a list of things you see as a way to define the place. John Steinbeck began Cannery Row this way:

  1. Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream…

What is this place to you? What do you see that will stick in your mind later? What makes this place unique? Begin like Steinbeck with the name of the place and its location.

  1. “Calle San Isidro in Seville is sunlight through construction dust, the shadows of businessmen, mothers, schoolchildren. It is bins of olives and gum on your shoe. It is the ‘snap!’ of a roasted snail pulled from its shell.”

Observations:
After you set the scene, the form of your journal may vary quite a bit, depending on your style of writing and your style of observing. If you’re a participant observer, you’ll likely be keeping notes of your conversations and the characters you meet. If you’re a neutral observer, you’ll likely want to keep a running record of what happens during your hour. You should put times next to your entries, at least the time you begin your observations. After that you can update the time or leave it as one continuous observation. Often daily life in a public place can seem like a highly-choreographed dance. How can you describe the rhythm of what you’re seeing? If someone else were going to recreate this scene (say, for a film or play) who would the characters be, what would they look like? Other ideas for journaling this scene include:

1.) Choose one of the characters and try to determine that person’s history or life experiences. Write it as a series of questions about the person.

2.) Try to explain the relationships between the people interacting. Do they know each other well? Are they friends? Acquaintances? What’s under the surface?

3.) Try to analyze the action you are observing in light of humanity across the planet. What is universal about this scene? What is timeless about this scene?

4.) What is different about this scene than you would expect in the United States?

5.) What is unique about this place in your opinion?