Believe it or not, that is not my whole family.
Robert Capa once said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.”
I bet you’ve heard that one before. I know I have, but it’s a challenge I regularly face. With candid and street photography, I have always felt more comfortable with a little bit of distance and a huge lens between me and my subject. I can chalk that up to a little social anxiety, but my real fear was that being too close to my subject would interfere with the portrait make them feel more self-conscious and awkward, or even annoyed, and that the resulting photos would look uncomfortable and stiff.
But on Christmas Eve, I was reminded again of how right Robert Capa was.
My family’s tradition, is to gather at my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve and gorge ourselves on pasta salad, pepperoni bread, fried raviolis, baked ziti, and most importantly, Meme’s meatballs.
They are straight-up, hands-down, the absolute best meatballs that you could ever dream of– let alone consume. If my grandmother’s meatballs were a religion, well, let’s just say I would find the energy to drag myself out of bed on Sundays. I would be there early.
But no matter how many times we go back for seconds or thirds, we can’t keep up with my grandmother. The woman made over 300 meatballs: she is an unstoppable meatball making machine which is a Christmas blessing in it’s own right, because it guarantees the best gift of all: Meatball Leftovers.
Every year, as the evening winds down, she grabs a couple of her kids or grandkids and disappears into the basement to begin packing the leftover meatballs and divvying them up between the families. This year, me, my boyfriend, and my uncle were tapped to help her with her task.
Once downstairs, my grandmother and I immediately went to work, counting meatballs and scooping them out of a tabletop roaster into tall, clear plastic containers, careful not to drip or spill red sauce on our Christmas outfits. At the end of the assembly line, my uncle would press the lids onto the containers and label each with the name of the family members still enjoying the festivities upstairs: Missy and Paul; Deb, Laura and Jim; Shelley, Kevin, Nicole and Josh, etc.
You may be asking yourself, wait, where did your boyfriend fit in this assembly line? He didn’t. While we went to work, he pulled out his Fuji X100T and started photographing my grandmother with the available light. He got close, he got closer than close, he got within a foot of my grandmother’s face and when she asked what he was doing, he told her “You know exactly what I’m doing” and started taking some of the most endearing, candid portraits of my grandmother I have ever seen; portraits that I know I will keep forever.
Was she uncomfortable at first? Absolutely. But we kept going, because after she was uncomfortable, she started laughing, and after she was done laughing, she went back to doing her thing: packing meatballs.
Seeing that transition in her and how quickly she accepted and then forgot that the camera was even there, was enlightening and kind of a relief. Being that close, didn’t hinder the shot, it made it. It’s a lesson I have taken to heart and that I hope you will too: it’s okay to be a little uncomfortable at first, it’s good to push past that feeling, it’s great to be close.
