Dave Jordano: The Secrets of a Documentary Photographer

In this episode, we sit down with acclaimed documentary photographer Dave Jordano. Dave Jordano did not come to documentary photography through the street. He came through still life, three decades of commercial work in Chicago with an 8x10 camera, planning every detail, controlling every light. When he returned to personal work around 2000, he brought that patience with him: the tripod, the long study, the frame decided before the shutter. He is, by his own account, the opposite of a street photographer. In this episode of Eyeshot 50mm he talks about treating the world as a still life, about why he refused to photograph Detroit as a fashionable ruin when "people still live here", about consent as a slow method built on conversation and returned prints, and about the one rule that held a fifty-year life together: love what you do, and treat it as a gift, not as work.