I was commissioned by Weber Shandwick for a Tinder campaign to help deaf people find love. We photographed twins Hermon and Heroda (Being_Her) teaching some British Sign Language (BSL) for Deaf Awareness Week (featured here in Cosmopolitan):
BSL is the fourth most-used language in the UK. It’s not only hand movements, but facial expressions and use of the body, too. It has its own grammar and sentence structure, and there are regional dialects.
There are 126 different versions around the world. Interestingly, the British and American versions are largely mutually unintelligible.
Decisions on nuance, emphasis and accuracy came up even for these simple phrases on the day. For each set the best version was argued for, and we had to reshoot a few sequences to get a version that everyone could agree on.
And more than this, as language is communicated as a flow in real time, we had to stop and choose the most salient part(s) of many of the gestures - often their start or end point, or both. This may sounds obvious, but when capturing movement - from a speaker at a conference to a sport action shot - photographers need to know and anticipate what to look for, and it’s central to telling the story. Not knowing BSL, however, I couldn’t guess what the right moments would be to photograph.
And, sure enough, I had creeping doubts later that the sequences were in the correct order..! It was a fun, unusual shoot which the twins made easy.
