CalmMoment.com 95Q You write a lot about the ethics of journalism here,
and the potential for treating subjects badly. How do
you feel about reporting now?
A I think it’s a useful thorn in the side of the journalist,
to think about not only how this dynamic of betrayal
is possible, but how some version of it is inevitable. As
a journalist, you’re not telling a story about another
person that they would have told about themselves –
you shouldn’t aspire to tell that version because they
can tell it. I guess I come back to the idea of owing my
subjects the dignity of complexity. I don’t owe them
a whitewash portrait, but I do owe them the chance to
surprise me, the opportunity to complicate whatever
my early notions of them were.
Q Which subjects have disrupted those notions?
A One good case study would probably be my profile
of Annie Appel, the photographer who has now spent
almost 3 0 years documenting and photographing the
same extended family, originally all in Mexico, and
now on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
I was initially quite moved by the premise of her
project, and that commitment to keep showing up for
the documentary act, and I remained moved by her
project. But my vision of her grew progressively more
complicated over the four years that I spent working
on that essay. I began to see, for example, that there
was something quite fraught about her relationship
to ongoingness – almost a poignant futility that had
to do with not being able to stomach the thought of
being done, because that would be acknowledging
that your portrait was going to be incomplete. And
I started to see that she had this fraught relationship
to boundaries. It was less like replacing one vision
with another, and more about seeing another side to
each of the coins that I had regarded at the outset.
Q Four years sounds like an awfully long time to
spend on one piece!
A I think part of it is, I do work for magazines, but
I feel like my primary home as a writer, and my
primary commitment, is to the book, and books
generally give me more time and room than magazine
journalism does. I’m spared certain kinds of relevance,
and I’m spared certain kinds of deadlines, too.
Q Do you ever find yourself getting sick of a piece after
years with it?
A Yes, definitely yes. The second thing is, I get sick
of certain kinds of emotional summoning around curiosity
and empathy. That’s why I wanted to include that shorter
essay, ‘Layover Story’, in the first section alongside those
larger reported pieces. It’s a story about subverted
expectations, and a story about the complexities of what,
why and how we think empathy or compassion are
deserved. But it’s also a piece about burnout and being a
little bit spent in terms
of engaging with otherness and the lives of strangers.
So its inclusion in that first section was a way of trying
to honour that aspect of encounter as well.
I think it’s also in conversation with the piece about Annie- her radical porousness and struggle with boundaries.
Boundaries feel problematic when they’re present, and
when they’re absent.
Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison
(Granta, £14.99) is out now. Read more about Leslie’s
work at lesliejamison.comPhotog
raphy^ Beowulf^ SheehanJamison is the director
of non-fiction at the
writing program at
Columbia University
School of the Arts, NYC.