I’ve talked about my interest in and appreciation for what is called street photography a number of times.
The dilemma for me—and it’s a much-discussed, sometimes hotly debated question among street photographers and photography critics—is that what seem to me to be the most interesting and pleasing images are those taken without the knowledge or active permission of the people in the image. There are street photographers who ask if it’s ok to take the picture, and what they then get is often a posed shot, unless they’re patient enough to just hang out and wait a long time until people forget they’re there.
There are contexts where I think everyone agrees you can’t ask in that way and where the people in an image are engaged in a form of public performance that makes it ok to click away: athletes in competition, people in a parade, musicians in a public outdoor stage.
There are contexts where I think almost everyone agrees it’s wrong to shoot a picture: people who think they’re in a private space or aren’t seen (especially who aren’t doing anything wrong), people where the shot unfairly distorts or deceives about what is actually going on, people who are intensely vulnerable, people who have a stated strong collective objection to being photographed under any circumstances. The Amish don’t want to be photographed, so even when I’ve been out shooting landscapes in between Philadelphia and Lancaster PA, I don’t shoot Amish individuals who are identifiable or personally visible. I once took shots at a religious revival in Philadelphia where one guy with a beer gut had it all hanging out while he had his hands up high in prayer. I deleted that one as soon as I saw the download.
This man at a local gathering of dog owners was looking at everyone like this the whole afternoon, so I don’t think it’s my camera alone that inspired this gaze. But it doesn’t feel like a leap to say that he wasn’t super-happy to see my lens pointed at him. And yet I not only kept it, I’m showing it to you.
One of the difficult things to suggest at any time that is especially hard in our present conversation is that at least some art, some forms of meaning-making, some human truths, shouldn’t be entirely dependent on whether we ourselves like and approve of what is being said about us, with us, to us. There is something amusingly truthful about this man’s facial expression and body language, something that was evident in him all day; something more universal than the man himself. I don’t want to lose it and I do want to share it.
If he were to tell me, “This makes me feel terrible and I hate it and I want it gone”, I guess I would delete it. I would hope he wouldn’t? Some of the best portraits in the world, photographic and otherwise, are ones where some truth shines through that is not entirely a beautifying, idealizing kind of image that the subject approves of. I might even be guessing wrong here: perhaps this is an image that would please and amuse its subject as much as it does me. Some of the burden here once again comes to how we view photographs as opposed to other visual depictions of human beings. If I worked on a painting inspired by the image that was just far enough away from the documentary aura that surrounds photography, perhaps no one would object: inspiration that leads to transformation has a different ethical calculus.
This is the look I needed at the height of COVID whenever I saw someone not masking or wearing their mask below their nose.