PDNEDU Notes

From the article "One to Watch: Louie Palu"

• Louie Palu, although nearly homeless and in poverty, provides the world with an insight during the war in Afghanistan, capturing moments that civilians would never see or speak of
• He say that he captures “the things that are the most difficult for us to talk about. The things that we really don’t want to look at or even think about. Things that are all about darkness”
• His inspirations are Robert Frank and Mary Ellen Mark, praising their courage in experiencing topics that can be so raw and controversial but also, would give great insight in things that other people wouldn't dare to live in
• After his intership with Mark that changed his life substantially, he began taking odd jobs since he couldn't quite find a photography job
• His father demeaned him since he didn't have a job, but then mentioned a Oregon mining job but instead of taking the job, he would make a job out of it by documenting their work
• This was Palu’s first big project, a 12-year extended series photographing gold miners’ daily lives, which eventually became the book Cage Call
• The mine was in Kirkland Lake, which Palu describes as “absolutely the middle of nowhere, about seven hours straight north of Toronto. The temperature was minus-15 Celsius. It was miserable.”
• “I didn’t care about anything except the fact that I was finally a documentary photographer working on what I felt was an important topic,” he explains. This was my subject and my story. I didn’t even think about getting anything published. I was just making pictures that were important to me.”
• He financed the project by returning to Toronto every few weeks to work construction and in bars
• He often slept in his car to save the cost of a motel room, until some of the miners eventually let him bunk on a sofa or in their guest room
• The resulting black-and-white photographs provide an unflinching portrait of the miners’ lives—the harshness of the land, the danger of the work and the damage life as a miner can inflict on the human body 
• The tonal range of Palu’s images adds to their drama, with figures set against deep shadows or with the camera lens pointed directly into the bright spotlights that illuminate the mine shafts, rendering the figures and machinery as silhouettes
• The pictures also show the stark everyday lives of the miners and their families, with houses built in the shadow of a smelter’s huge smokestack, children playing in a school playground adjacent to a mine entrance, the faces of women who’ve lost fathers or husbands to mining accidents
• His portraits of men who’ve lost arms, suffered severe head injuries or been paralyzed in accidents reveal his subjects’ dignity and strength in the face of harsh adversity through capturing these moments in film
• It took several years before Palu felt he had a body of work he could begin showing, though the initial reception was less than enthusiastic. “Most people didn’t get it, and no one would hire me for an assignment. But I never let it deter me. I believed very strongly in what I was doing and knew that sooner or later, I’d find somebody who understood my work.”
• Very slowly, he began to appear on the radars of photo editors and art directors in and around Toronto, though he still wasn’t getting enough work to actually make a living. 
• Then, in 2001, he was hired as a full-time staff photographer for the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail, where he had previously worked as a freelancer. The editors “wanted a photographer who wasn’t a photojournalist or standard news photographer and who could shoot differently for the paper,”
• One job he offered was to go to Kandahar and take pictures of the soldiers in battle, but he didn't have sufficient funds to travel from Afghanistan back to the US
• After his 5 year run, he then resulted in homelessness, without a home
• He later mentioned in one of his many lectures “I really like teaching, and somewhere down the road I can see teaching at a college somewhere, at least part-time,” he says. “And I know that someday, I’m really going to enjoy having furniture.”