I love the idea of street photography. I love much of what has been done by photographers that has been labeled as street work: spontaneous images of human beings going about their lives in the world. Freezing time to see more closely what we all see of each other all the time.
Street photography, in the widest sense of the concept, embraces work that is close to portraiture, where the photographer and the photographed know in advance that pictures are going to be made and there is some staging or arrangement of the scene, the poses, the circumstances, but it also includes images made without the knowledge of the photographed.
At one end of the spectrum, the work can lose some of its sense of life and surprise—or it can edge into the general issue of portraiture (photographic or otherwise) where the artist places people into scenes and postures that reflect the artist’s understanding of those people, or their goals as an artist, while posing as something observed, something unplanned. I don’t mind a startling image of Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, but I do mind it if it is staged as if the photographer just happened to witness it one day walking down the street. Perhaps I shouldn’t: why one artifice and not another? But I do mind nevertheless.
At the other end of the spectrum, people end up in images whether they want to be or not, and the photographer is the one who decides whether or not the image is right or appropriate or fair. Everybody could end up on someone’s smartphone photo directory with their finger jammed up their nose if the smartphone user was willing to spend a life tapping away at everyone they meet until they found the nose-picking Decisive Moment.
I love street photography. I want to do it more than I do. But I’m a chicken about approaching people to ask—and it often spoils what I was seeing and valuing if I do.
I’m also incredibly anxious about portraiture generally even though people strike me as the most interesting visual subject for photography. I’ve had charming conversations with people who’ve asked for a picture—there’s a man I still want to find who wanted a picture of himself with his dog, but gave me an email that bounced. I’ve had other people who stopped what they were doing to pose like it’s a yearbook photo and I don’t have the courage or patience to tell them to stop. I’ve had people where I’ve really wanted to take the shot but was confident that the next thing that would happen was me getting punched in the face—there was a guy who was the Most Philly Human In History once outside a salvage yard I was going to and I still can see his face, even if I can’t show it to all of you this morning.
So when I do it, I sometimes work with a telephoto lens, which is not really ideal because of how it flattens faces, plus poses technical challenges in a lot of light conditions. It’s also a lot less surreptitious than it might seem if you’re in public: there’s no concealing where a telephoto is pointing. Sometimes I go to crowded gatherings with a smaller lens or a smaller point-and-shoot camera. Folks aren’t as wary about being photographed at a parade or a street fair.
I throw away or avoid shots that I imagine to be embarrassing or that involve total vulnerability—the man at an outdoor prayer revival whose gut is hanging out of his shirt when he raises his hands reverently, the homeless person sleeping rough. But I still feel conflicted always. And there’s the moment where in seeing, you are seen, and have to decide what comes next.
Sometimes I keep the shots anyway.
Sometimes I don’t.
Love the two shots, however they were taken