Even if you don't have a real life mentor to meet once in a while, I always find there are vignettes you can glean and examples you can follow from people whose work you admire, despite not knowing them personally.
Two people I highly repect have offered me valuable insights recently. In lone freelance life, you need these more than ever. The first was Maureen Lipman in a recent article for the New Statesman taken from a BBC Radio 2 programme called: "What Makes Us Human?"
In her own deft and amusing way she boils being human down to two prime qualities: those of empathy and creativity. Empathy: a gift which falls a long way beyond basic human kindness, which enables you to imagine yourself as someone else, and perhaps want to act on this feeling as a result. Creativity: from the simple art of crafting a letter to writing a symphony and everything else in between, is following up on the human need to make one's mark, or as the dictionary put it: 'to bring into being or or form out of nothing. To bring into being by force of imagination.'
As often happens when you muse on something, another person or event comes out of the woodwork in perfect synchronicity to your thinking. A few hours after I'd read Maureen Lipman's article, J and I discovered a documentary about the photojournalist Don McCullin, his life and his work; and the following morning, an interview with him on Saturday live on Radio 4 - a mainstay for us in the odd moment of silence between soliloquies from either of the dwarves in our high ceilinged kitchen.
Don McCullin echoes Maureen Lipman's thoughts - first requirement is empathy, and then you need something to be creative with - in his case a camera. And with it he travelled to some of the most terrifying and well known wars including Vietnam, Biafra and the Congo, most of which would not have occupied such a startling place in global imaginations without his arresting images. He's often asking himself the question about what right he has to be witnessing human suffering, and what his role is within it. At what point does the empathy become sensational - and his role become irresponsible? Of any war correspondent I've read about, he seems to get it right time and time again, and I try and keep people like him in mind when I'm working myself- albeit on a much, much tinier and much less dramatic scale. But my work still involves the portrayal of human suffering and I'm constantly feeling uncomfortable about this issue, and asking myself these questions. What exactly am I doing here and am I really being useful?
A couple of weeks ago I went back to Jordan for some work, crossing the border with St Grace and the dwarves who were going to have a week's holiday - St Grace with her husband, the dwarves with the Glammy, while I worked.
My task was to collect the material for 5 short films on Syrian children in Jordan for Unicef - highlighting the issues of child refugees, 3 years on from when the conflict began in their country. This time I was blessed with a kick-ass Egyptian translator and fixer, who not only has the Arabic lingo and is female, but throws herself at anything that's looks like a to do list and is happy to work a 20 hour day for something she cares about. She also has a brilliant sense of humour and between us we did in 4 days what would normally take me 8.
I was nervous because most of our interviewees were teenage boys, who are not my usual subjects. But in a way I found their stories even more moving than some of the girls I've spoken to, as they are often bearing the yoke of family finances and entire loss of education in many cases. And it's these young boys who, having supported their family since they were 9 or 10, reach the age of 20 with no education and no skills to speak of let alone show, and are then expected to start their own family.
Here are the 4 boys and 1 girl we met.
Two people I highly repect have offered me valuable insights recently. In lone freelance life, you need these more than ever. The first was Maureen Lipman in a recent article for the New Statesman taken from a BBC Radio 2 programme called: "What Makes Us Human?"
In her own deft and amusing way she boils being human down to two prime qualities: those of empathy and creativity. Empathy: a gift which falls a long way beyond basic human kindness, which enables you to imagine yourself as someone else, and perhaps want to act on this feeling as a result. Creativity: from the simple art of crafting a letter to writing a symphony and everything else in between, is following up on the human need to make one's mark, or as the dictionary put it: 'to bring into being or or form out of nothing. To bring into being by force of imagination.'
As often happens when you muse on something, another person or event comes out of the woodwork in perfect synchronicity to your thinking. A few hours after I'd read Maureen Lipman's article, J and I discovered a documentary about the photojournalist Don McCullin, his life and his work; and the following morning, an interview with him on Saturday live on Radio 4 - a mainstay for us in the odd moment of silence between soliloquies from either of the dwarves in our high ceilinged kitchen.
Don McCullin echoes Maureen Lipman's thoughts - first requirement is empathy, and then you need something to be creative with - in his case a camera. And with it he travelled to some of the most terrifying and well known wars including Vietnam, Biafra and the Congo, most of which would not have occupied such a startling place in global imaginations without his arresting images. He's often asking himself the question about what right he has to be witnessing human suffering, and what his role is within it. At what point does the empathy become sensational - and his role become irresponsible? Of any war correspondent I've read about, he seems to get it right time and time again, and I try and keep people like him in mind when I'm working myself- albeit on a much, much tinier and much less dramatic scale. But my work still involves the portrayal of human suffering and I'm constantly feeling uncomfortable about this issue, and asking myself these questions. What exactly am I doing here and am I really being useful?
A couple of weeks ago I went back to Jordan for some work, crossing the border with St Grace and the dwarves who were going to have a week's holiday - St Grace with her husband, the dwarves with the Glammy, while I worked.
My task was to collect the material for 5 short films on Syrian children in Jordan for Unicef - highlighting the issues of child refugees, 3 years on from when the conflict began in their country. This time I was blessed with a kick-ass Egyptian translator and fixer, who not only has the Arabic lingo and is female, but throws herself at anything that's looks like a to do list and is happy to work a 20 hour day for something she cares about. She also has a brilliant sense of humour and between us we did in 4 days what would normally take me 8.
I was nervous because most of our interviewees were teenage boys, who are not my usual subjects. But in a way I found their stories even more moving than some of the girls I've spoken to, as they are often bearing the yoke of family finances and entire loss of education in many cases. And it's these young boys who, having supported their family since they were 9 or 10, reach the age of 20 with no education and no skills to speak of let alone show, and are then expected to start their own family.
Here are the 4 boys and 1 girl we met.
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