To be the person filming is to discover that the presence of a camera transforms all relationships. To film is to bring the future into the present and to see in ways that you cannot without a camera. If these sound like slightly esoteric words of wisdom from a camera guru, it’s because they are. The ideas come from documentary director and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson, Dick Johson is Dead), who already had more than 50 shooting credits to her name before directing her first feature.

In spending so much time behind the camera, Johnson developed a deep, philosophical approach to filmmaking that would be informative for anyone making movies. Fortunately, she breaks down this approach and her ideas behind it in her Master Class on the Moving Image as a Relationship. Read on for takeaways from the session on the crucial relationship between filmmakers and images, the inherent power associated with controlling the images we create and how embracing contradictions can be our best asset in discovering who we are as artists.

For her critically acclaimed and deeply personal documentary Dick Johnson is Dead, Johnson’s inspiration came from the biggest contradiction of all: acknowledging her father’s mortality while simultaneously attempting to keep him alive forever. After losing her mother to Alzheimer’s Disease and learning her father, Dick Johnson, had been diagnosed with dementia, she realized she needed to be present for such a transitional time in her father’s life and helped him move from his home of 50 years to her apartment in New York City. Being a filmmaker, she decided to film this emotionally charged time in their lives. But she didn’t stop there. In an unorthodox approach to documentary filmmaking, she asked him to stage multiple scenes depicting how he could possibly die, to be intercut with the vérité footage.

“This film is a full on experiment with life and death,” says Johnson. “I know on one level I’m going to fail; of course my father is going to die someday. So how do we make something that keeps him alive? We can kill him in the movie and bring him back to life.”

Johnson says she has a fascination with dementia because her father no longer understands time or space, which is a stark contrast to her work. “As a camerperson, you are translating time. You are in the present with the knowledge that the footage you are filming will be used in the future. You’re a translator between your own interior experience and that of the people you are filming.” The feelings that filming evokes for you as a cameraperson may be completely different from what it evokes from your subject, which in turn can be different from the experience of the audience.

“You are connected to a machine that is allowing you to see things differently than anyone else, including the director,” Johnson says. That perspective is paramount in understanding the craft of camerawork. The differing points-of-view from your collaborators and from the larger world around you will not always be compatible with each other, but can ultimately be useful in defining who you are as a person and as an artist. The fundamental question will be: Why am I filming?

This embracing of contradictions in order to find your story continues into the post-production process. As is usually the case in documentary filmmaking, Johnson had not planned the structure of the final film from the beginning, but rather it required constant adjustments during production and post production as the film evolved.

“It is possible to observe in life, [whereas] it is not possible to observe what happens in death,” Johnson explains. “It is possible to imagine what happens in death. In the present we can observe what’s happening, [whereas] the future we cannot yet observe. How does that relate to the edit room? You can look at footage and learn things, then go back and film new things and put them in. The structure of the film ends up being very different from the experience of filming it. So I said, can we push that even further? Can we take what we’ve observed, edit with it, and imagine how it can be different?”

Filming and creating a narrative that reflects the world around you is all about understanding relationships you will create through the very act of holding a camera.“Me plus the camera together are capable of making images,” says Johnson. “So already, it’s a relationship between me and the camera, even if no one is there. That’s relationship #1. Then obviously there are the people who surround the camera, behind it and in front of it. Maybe even the dead are present.”

Collecting images that interest her is a cornerstone of Johnson’s creative process, whether it’s in film or physical images such as photographs or clippings from printed media. “Images are a way of keeping track of who I’ve been and it’s a stimulating source book for me. I give myself my own ideals. What do I wish to be? What movie do I wish I had made?”

That inspiration stays with Johnson when it comes to her own work behind the camera. “With your directors and other cinematographers, create time to look at other peoples’ footage and your footage in the process of being edited,” Johnson says. Studying images this way is what ultimately led to her acclaimed documentary, Cameraperson. The film is comprised of footage that Johnson shot throughout her career for many different projects and in many different countries.

“Cameraperson was so meaningful to me because I spent a lot of time in the edit room with my own footage that I had shot for other people,” explains the filmmaker. “I started to be able to see it in my own way from the perspective of the future. While I was filming it I was in the present and limited by my own blind spots.”

It’s also important to remember what will change once you, as the camerapserson, have captured those images. It’s not the end of creating those relationships’ rather, it’s a shift to how relationships will be constructed with your audience. “One of the things I believe about image making is that images continue to be made by the people who watch them,” she says.

“We always have to talk about power when we talk about camerawork,” Johnson stresses. When filming, it’s crucial to remember that you have the power to define how these images, including your subjects, are portrayed to the world, and that these images will continue to live on long after you or your subject have passed away. Especially with the advent of the internet and streaming, filmmakers have less control over how their images are distributed now than they ever have before.

Dick Johnson is Dead required a lot of acknowledgment on the subject of power, both between Johnson and her father and the far more complex relationship between life and death. “I was pretty clear I didn’t have any power on one level,” she explains. “On another level, I did. Filming my father would give me the chance to reconstruct the part of him that was falling apart because of dementia and it would give me a chance to hold onto him after death.”

It’s a very personal decision to create a film and send it out into the world. Once it meets an audience, a film will have an entire life out of the hands of those who made it. This can be exhilarating and rewarding, but also comes with a unique sense of responsibility. “I’m really interested in loss, memory, and time and interested in questions of power and misrepresentation and how we do this work,” says Johnson. “This question around whether it was OK to make a film with my father while he had dementia is a question I would answer Yes! No! Maybe! I don’t know! Of course not! It is full of contradictions. I knew I was responsible for the physical safety of my father and his image in the world.”

It’s critical to understand how and why you want to film something or someone, but it’s just as important to ask yourself why your subject wants to be filmed and how their motivations may change over time. Cameraperson included footage Johnson had shot during a boxing match, and any boxer participating in the event agreed, as a condition of competing, to be filmed. Johnson explains what happened with a particular athlete, who had agreed to be filmed at a time when he thought he would win the match, which did not turn out to be the case.

“He saw me and he was really angry,” Johnson explains. “How did that shift his relationship [to the camera]? He thought he was going into privacy when he went down the hall. When he saw me he realized he wasn’t in privacy.” Johnson kept the camera on him as he angrily left the ring and walked down the hall to the locker room, but she made a decision to respect a certain boundary once the boxer had walked away from her and into a bathroom. “I felt like he was setting a limit when he went into the bathroom, saying ‘Don’t follow me in here, lady!’”

Though she didn’t follow him into the bathroom, she did keep the camera rolling and patiently waited for him to come out again. Once he did, she was able to follow him again and capture a sweet moment where he went looking for his mother. These are the decisions that shape what kind of an artist you are and what kind of story you want to tell. “We are revealed by what we film and how we film,” Johnson says.

Johnson was filming another movie in Kabul, Afghanistan when she ultimately created her short film, The Above. While living in Kabul, she noticed a blimp in the sky and asked what it was, only to be given the short answer: “That’s classified.” She was subsequently ordered not to film it. “I thought, wait a minute, are you seriously telling me I can’t film the sky?”

Her interest in the blimp came from her background of growing up in a religious household. “It’s not just political, it stretches to my own personal experience as a child who was raised religiously and who believed a bible verse that said, ‘God knows your thoughts before you think them.’ I believed that and it’s a part of how my brain structure was formed.” When she began filming and interviewing locals, Johnson found that the assumptions and opinions of the blimp varied greatly, but at the same time, many mirrored her own fascination. “It was amazing to find a man who said to me, ‘God created the person who made the blimp and God sees everything.’ It was as if this man was speaking to my childhood self.”

Johnson began with smaller, basic questions while filming The Above: What is this blimp? Who controls it? And what does the community think of it? But as is often the case with any artistic medium, those smaller questions are gateways to larger questions about the human experience and the larger world in which we all live. “What are the big systems at work? Militaries, religions, nationalism, social control, expectations for what one gender can do or be or how many genders there are, all of those things.” Johson’s process was all about gathering evidence, finding clues, taking risks and discovering how uncovering answers from her interview subjects revealed who they were as people. She also points out the importance of asking questions when you have the opportunity; you may not know how much time you have in a particular space and when you might be asked to leave.

By following her instincts on her own terms and in her own time outside of her other shoot, Johnson ended up making an entire film out of a simple curiosity.

In determining where your interests might take your creative practice, Johnson recommends creating a long list of what interests you, what you want to say, why you’re doing this work and how your work affects others, and pay particular attention to how those needs may contradict one another. Contradictions are bound to happen, and that’s OK; they don’t all need to be resolved.

“You’re asking so many things of yourself: make something remarkable, make money, change the world, have fun, and on and on,” Johnson says. “I support the self-criticism and criticism of systems of power, and being gentle with each other and ourselves is how we’re able to go through these processes.”

For filmmakers looking to develop their style and learn the art of creating visual narratives, Johnson advises patience, focus and a lot of self-reflection. It’s critical to know the things that matter most to you and how you want to communicate your vision to the world.

“If you’re trying to make something truly original that matters, you will have many obstacles no matter who you are—you will have different obstacles depending on who you are—but we have to think of these things as a long game because we don’t just want these things for our own success. We want a better life for everyone on the planet,” Johnson says. “Life is short. We don’t know how long our lives might be, we don’t know what’s going to happen to this planet, so we have long, hard choices to make. How do you do that in the context of your own life as a filmmaker?”

According to Johnson, being a filmmaker will not be an easy road of self-discovery, so it’s critical to confront the hard choices in life—especially those that come with responsibilities and contradictions—and do your best to embrace the challenges and build community. She emphasizes, “Try to make meaningful work, try to find a process that is respectful to other people, try to accept your limitations and be kind to yourself, and try to make some gorgeous movies that change our lives and inspire us,” adding, “I would love to see the movies you dream about making, so think about how and who with. Don’t try to do it all by yourself. It will be a lot more fun if you do it with a lot of other people.”