Julius Margan

There is a scene that opens the documentary Journal de France that many photographers might relate to. Magnum photographer Raymond Depardon has set up his unwieldy 8x10 inch camera to photograph a small building on a street intersection in a French town. The film crew documenting him mimic his camera angle so that the viewer's point of view appears to be approximately that of Depardon's camera. Because he needs a fairly long exposure (one second), and it's a busy street, he needs a little gap in traffic. Every time he is just about to take the photo, someone walks into the shot or a car drives past. He waits and waits, and finally he is ready – just then, an elderly gentleman strolls right across in front of him, ambling very slowly across the street and right through the centre of the frame. Eventually, we hear a click and a whir and Depardon gets his shot.

It's just one of the little oddities about working alone in the field with a large format camera. I read a recent story in Wired's Raw File, where Victoria Sambunaris discussed being stopped repeatedly by law enforcement with her 5x7 inch wooden field camera (while working on a project documenting landscapes and infrastructure). In some ways I can understand the inquisitiveness of police officers and the general public. Setting up a camera, often by yourself, and waiting sometimes hours for the right light or perfect set of conditions could look a little suspicious to someone unfamiliar with that sort of equipment. But as she points out, there are less obvious ways to photograph something, so why would you go to those lengths if you were doing something dodgy? I've also been questioned a number of times over the years, yelled at, looked at with suspicion, or just approached with curiosity. Most of the time it's sorted out fairly quickly but sometimes by the time you've stopped to chat the light has gone, or something has changed, and the moment has been lost.

When I think of great road trips in photography I think about Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, or Joel Sternfeld. Each of them committed serious amounts of time to travelling. Of course it was a different time – people were less suspicious and more open to being photographed without fear of where the photos would end up, or what the purpose was. But they were all ahead of their time and each defied the conventional photographic trends of the period in their own ways.

Raymond Depardon also spent much time on a road trip – travelling alone on a massive project that lasted six years. Journal de France is really a bit like two documentaries in one. In the contemporary part he travels through France photographing buildings in small towns with his 8x10 camera; the sort of places that might seem unremarkable to a developer but have a French quirkiness or sense of history that might be too easily forgotten should they be demolished. The other side of it features footage from his equally interesting documentaries from the '60s and '70s, made on occasion with help from his partner Claudine Nougaret who did the sound recording. I call them documentaries, but they don't have the traditional interview segments that we are normally used to. Instead he became interested in a style known as Direct Cinema. It was also reportage, but radical for the time in that it used techniques that we might associate more with modern “fly-on-the-wall” documentary making. Direct Cinema also helped pioneer the use of hand-held cameras, used tiny crews, and incorporated a loose shooting style that we've come to be very familiar with in shows such as NYPD Blue, The Office and so called single-camera comedies. Reality TV also makes extensive use of these techniques. With current digital video, we take for granted the technical side of such things but it's easy to forget that back in the '60s sound editing and shooting loosely wasn't as easy.

If his films shared some of Reality Television's techniques, the subject matter was far more interesting. Mercenaries, patients in a sanitarium, ambulance drivers. Dispensing with the traditional interview he would just leave the camera on and let people talk amongst themselves -- strange and rarely-heard stories would come out as people became less aware of the camera. Other subjects included workers in public institutions – criminals in the justice system, and politicians talking behind closed doors. Often, he would devote months to a project, sometimes in very trying circumstances.

He made other films documenting people simply walking in the street – films that have a kind of lyrical quality, the camera sometimes following someone for a only few seconds then moving on, reminding me of another film from a similar period F for Fake, where Orson Welles edits a long sequence where he secretly films various mens' reactions as they watch his partner Oja Kodar simply walk down the street (another film that helped pioneer modern editing techniques only to be widely criticised on release but celebrated much later).

In an interview in American Suburb X, Depardon discusses the aspect of being a loner in film-making. He sees it as offering much more freedom. There is the freedom to be able to go where you want without restriction, the freedom to spent more time on a project. Photography is generally considered more of a solitary pursuit and film-making more of a collaborative one – but that could change as news reporting moves out of print and further onto the web. Embedding content from video platforms such as YouTube has opened up new means of storytelling without the traditional time restrictions of TV and radio. The recent (hugely popular) podcast Serial is a good example of long-form journalism taking a different approach (devoting a whole year to a researching a single story told over twelve episodes). As reporters start moving on from the big new agents, perhaps something similar will start to emerge with video-reporting.