To me, street photography feels like an intrusion in other people’s lives. The more I think about it and the more I try to do it, the more I feel uncomfortable about it.
This is of course ignoring the issues with truth, representation, ethics, and consequences. This is really the first step of that more general reflection: whether the activity should or can even take place and its place in reality.
I’m not even talking about the in your face street photography a la Bruce Gilden, Mark Cohen, and other idiots. I see that kind of behaviour as bullying and attention seeking. I’m talking street photography from a respectful distance, not trying to make people look bad or scared, just a documentary approach with minimal disruption.
One of the rare things people cherish in cities is their anonymity. When I used to live in large cities (Paris, Edinburgh, even Aberdeen), I didn’t know anyone I didn’t want to know and nobody was paying attention to me. In Edinburgh I didn’t know the name of a single of my neighbours. In Aberdeen it took my wife and I three years to discover that our neighbours of 5 years, 3 doors down the road from us, were French (unlike the Brits abroad, the French tend not to congregate together that much).
That’s one of the things I miss now that I live in a village with less than 100 inhabitants (97 at last census a few years ago, of which about 75 adults). Here, everybody keeps an eye on everybody else. There are no secrets. The instant you do something out of the routine (I’m not even talking about out of the ordinary, just deviation from the routine), your neighbours know and have already discussed it with their neighbours. You drive a different car, someone will ask you about it randomly (“you’re rich you have more than one car”). You paint your gate a different colour, someone will comment that they were used to the old one. You go shopping on a different day, your neighbours will notice. Soon after we moved in, we were asked by an old woman in the street why we didn’t leave our large gate open all day as it was tradition in the village to open your gate in the morning and close it in the evening as most houses have entirely high walled gardens that don’t let people see in (we considered that she answered her own question on that one).
It’s a great thing to be able to mind your own business knowing that nobody will care about it. Most people don’t realise it because that’s all they know (in most developed countries, 80% of the population or more live in cities, and few leave them for long enough periods of time to experience any other kind of life). You don’t pay attention to me and I won’t pay attention to you. It’s a kind of the implicit social contract of the city.
Taking photos of people on the street without their consent feels like breaking that social contract. By taking someone’s photo, assuming they realise it, even from a distance, you suddenly jump into their reality and you make yourself known as an observer of their life. You’re no longer a pair of strangers that aren’t even aware of each other’s existence. You’re now linked by an event that only one of the protagonists decided to create and impose on the other. In a way, it’s breaking the fourth wall.
To me it’s no different from turning up at someone’s door in the middle of the night. It might be justified in some cases, it might be ethical (assuming you knock at the door before going in), but it’s still very disturbing and an intrusion in someone’s life. I feel uncomfortable doing that.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind when people take my photo in the street. Not only because I’m aware I might want to do it as well, and therefore it would be hypocritical not to allow others to do the same thing, but also I understand the implications. I understand that I’m now dragged into the photographer’s world, that I will appear in his photo, and that through them I might be observed by other people (e.g. online in a portfolio). I accept it, even though the photographer might not be aware of it themselves and there has been no formal communication between us.
Of course, the camera has a distancing effect through its own existence: it’s physically between the photographer and its subject; it creates an indirection of the light to the eye (in fact in the case of SLRs, you don’t actually see the photo you take due to the mirror obstructing the view at that instant); and the activity of photography injects a kind of professional distance, even for amateurs. It’s not uncommon for shy people to hide behind their camera, as it it was creating a line between their world and their subject’s world. But that’s not enough to make me feel at ease with the invasion of someone else’s private bubble.
You could argue that you would benefit from talking to people you want to photograph, learning about them, understanding them more. And that’s valid, but I’d categorise that kind of photography as more photo journaling than street photography. Street photography is more of a pure witness of an instant, a fleeting and unplanned situation, blink and it’s gone, than trying to account for someone’s story or send a message. I’d love to do photo journalism, but I know it’s not my thing.
I could of course take photos of streets without people in them. That’s what I usually do. But that’s urban landscape really, not street photography. The rules are pretty much the same as for landscape photography, the equipment and the processes the same, and the point is capturing a large area and give a sense of scale, as in landscape photography.
That’s a cop out and not a solution. It can’t be called street photography. It has its own merits, and cities can look very pretty and interesting without people, but I’m currently considering street photography because that’s something I got interested in lately.
It could be that I have to accept that street photography isn’t for me and stay closer to my comfort zone (pushing yourself out of your comfort zone isn’t always a Good Thing).
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong