Do you consider yourself a photographer or a photojournalist? Explain.

Both. I’m not at all sitting on the fence with that answer. At root, I have a fascination with making images, and I’ve never completely lost the early sense I had when I was young that there’s something magical about creating an entire, complex image, just the way I wanted it, pulled from the life around me. Such a simple procedure, yet so full of rich possibilities to create visually. At that level of feeling about imagery, the type of subject is less important than the chance to explore with a camera.

That said, my first love is documentary reportage, and that means journalism. Not news journalism, but still the investigative, curiosity-driven and probing methods that I learned working for clients such as Time-Life, the Smithsonian Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, and so on.

And photojournalism also means using these enquiring skills basically for the purpose of storytelling. Photo stories for magazines, and for entire books, have been very much at the core of my work.

You’ve traveled all around the globe and written several books on various cultures. If you had to pick one culture that’s had the biggest impact on your life, which one would it be? Why?

Yes, there have been many, and I’ve rather sought out that kind of assignment, probably because anthropology was a part of my geography degree course at Oxford. Entering another society, particularly a well-defined and different one, can be an involving experience, at least if you do it with a wish to get under its skin. So I suppose the culture that had, and still has, a special place in my affections is that of the Akha, a hill-dwelling minority in southeast Asia.

This was my first complete (meaning only I was shooting) book assignment from Time-Life. I’d worked my way up that ladder with other books, but had shared the shooting with others—first Athens with Magnum photographer Costa Manos, then the Pathan with Toby Molenaar (we had to have a male and a female photographer to cover their strict Islamic mores). The Akha book was all mine! And for three months. At that time we had no access to southwest China, so I shot on the Thai-Burmese border. Even had a small house built in the village. It was another world, economically marginalized but culturally rich.

There’s a great picture on your site of a ritual performed by members of Murle. Can you explain what’s happening here.

This was a two-year book project on Sudan that I did with two old friends, Tim Carney, the last US Ambassador to the country, and his wife Vicki Butler, who had been the Time stringer in Bangkok.
This week was a tricky one, at the foot of the Boma Plateau close to the Ethiopian border, and so isolated that there had been no western visitors for two decades. We had to hire an aircraft from Nairobi to get there, and by the time I took this picture I had already received a yellow card from the local SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) commander for having flown near some anti-aircraft batteries. We were clawing our way back into favor, and by this point we were allowed to photograph a dance among an age-set of this ethnic minority, the Murle. Age-sets feature strongly, and young men and women date and marry within age-sets. So it’s kind of like clubbing, I guess.

How do you get access to such remote and private locations? What does it take to get that kind of access?

No single answer, but in general it goes back to photojournalistic training. And persistence. And being imaginative in finding ways in. Sudan was actually one of the most difficult; it was in the two years leading up to the signing of the peace accord, so the civil war was technically still on. Tim, fortunately, had maintained good contacts at high level in the north and the south, but there were always local situations, so we still needed to talk, explain, persuade. But in the end there’s nothing like the fear of not being able to get access for shooting to motivate you! And there’s usually a way to do most things; the trick is being able to find it and then put it into action.

Please share a photo from your most recent trip. Tell us the story behind the picture and what your assignment was.

This is from the one before last, as the last one was a book on interiors in Singapore, and there’s not much of a story behind that kind of planned shooting, attractive though the results were.
This picture is from a book assignment that I’m in the middle of, on the Colombian Caribbean city of Cartagena. I’ll complete the shooting on my next trip this coming January.

Cartagena is the new hot destination city of South America these days, but it certainly wasn’t always so. As the second oldest colonial city in South America (the first is just up the coast, Santa Marta, though by no means as interesting), Cartagena has spectacular monuments, forts and an almost-complete city wall. Most published pictures of Cartagena focus on this aspect, but my theme is different—on street life.

This is the coast of Colombia, where the Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was from, and it’s slightly crazy. No, I take that back, it’s distinctly crazy. In the West, people think Marquez invented magical realism and wrote about it. Not true. He wrote about normal life as lived here. Having been given the keys of the city last January by the mayor, I’m an honorary Cartageneran, and love it, not least for street photography.

You also have a passion for teaching. What is it about teaching others that you enjoy?

It’s important to pass things on. That’s especially true of photography, which is one of the most practical and pragmatic creative professions. Most photographers seem to learn by doing—what you might call on-the-job training if you were feeling ironic—and the only way to fast track from that is to benefit from the experience of others. I did. It was mainly from art directors and picture editors rather than from photographers, but it helped me a lot.

To my mind, too much is written about photography by people who…well, just write about photography rather than actually do it for a living, a career. That sounds a bit self-serving, I realize, but in any career you care to name, there are things that you learn only by doing it day in and day out for years, and that kind of experience is something you can’t get out of a manual.

So, I write these books, and also do two or three workshops a year, and we’re now just about to start an online Foundation Course that I’ve been working on for the past few months. Online seems to be the way to go, in order to reach more people, and reach them interactively. Here is a link to it: http://bit.ly/1nCFWk7

You use email and social media marketing a lot, how does it help your business?

It’s not been entirely willingly, I have to admit. Well, email yes, that’s transitioned normally into everyone’s life, but social media is a bit of a chore. I like writing, but jumping through the hoops of search engine optimization and re-tweeting is not exactly thrilling, is it?

In fact, it’s rather the opposite of photography, which means getting out there into the real world with your camera. But it’s necessary, and a very effective way of communicating with your audience. I think I find Twitter the least easy. When I’m really busy I have no time to tweet, but that’s when there’s more of interest to tweet about. I keep asking my assistant to help, but she’s not that keen on it either.

An effective website, though, is essential and very convenient. I use mine partly as portfolio and partly as a way of delivering to and communication with clients on assignments. A photographer’s website ought to be the place for directing people, because there you can control exactly what appears and how. Incidentally, attention spans are short these days, and for that reason I usually tell people to select, very carefully, their best dozen shots only, and then concentrate all attention on them. If a client or picture editor likes your work, they’ll know within 12 pictures. Anything else they want to see, they’ll ask for.

Learn more about Michael Freeman on his website.