I know I keep talking about being too shy to do street photographs, but as I look over my archive of my photographs, I’ve done quite a few of them.
So my anxiety here is perhaps about the uncertain borderlands of my own sense of what is and is not ok, against a backdrop of intensifying contradiction in public culture about photography, privacy and vulnerability. (There’s an interesting moment in the New Yorker profile of Samuel Delany, who has a long-established autobiographical habit of photographing people he sees and places he goes to, where he gets scolded by four “smartly-dressed” women who see him taking a picture near the William Way LGBTQ Center just east of Broad St. that includes people sleeping rough, which is an admonition with all sorts of historical layering involved.)
What I remain comfortable with is any public event, anything that convenes a public, any place that is distinctively public like a park or a square, because there is some sense in which that is very different than being photographically isolated as an individual who happens to be moving between interior places as you go about your daily business. So these two images were from an evangelical revival staged down near Independence Hall some years ago—I figure that if these folks are going to come into the material space of a democratic public, then in turn I am comfortable witnessing them.
In technical terms, the major issue with this shot is just the woman in the foreground, because her legs are out of frame. That’s the biggest issue I have with street photography in general: getting what you want in the shot while dealing with the pressure of a singular moment—an expression, a movement, a contrast—is hard and I don’t really think you can do it consciously. But that is also its strength as a genre and why street photographers generally stress spontaneity as an aesthetic requirement: it makes you see people and places in public in a way that we’re otherwise often trained not to see.