People like to be honoured

“For students who are grappling with the process of learning how to photograph people, there are two possibilities. You can look someone in the eye and be calm and smile and be sincere with them, and then they have a choice: to either allow you to make a photograph or not. But one way or another, by virtue of the fact that you’re honouring them by looking them in the eye, they’re not going to be upset. But on the other hand, if you take a picture and turn away someone’s going to feel like you’ve just taken something from them. They are aware immediately if you are not comfortable with yourself. And if you’re not comfortable with yourself, they’re not going to be comfortable with you either.” Peter Turnley

One of the most frequent questions and subsequent discussions within classes at the Bangkok Photo School is “How do I go about photographing people in public?”. I found Peter Turnley’s quote, above, in a recent edition of “News Photographer”, the journal of the National Press Photographers’ Association and it seems to explain the principles that we try to teach students during classes at the school.

At the risk of boring students who have already heard me repeat this mantra in class, if photography is about communicating an experience, and it is, then you need to have had the experience in the first place before you can photograph it. I think photographers often approach their attempts to photograph people in public in a rather awkward way. Their goal (our goal, I guess, since it’s often my aim too), is to capture an image of a person that is, for want of a better word, “engaging”. We’ve all been enchanted by Steve McCurry’s portrait of the “Afghan Girl” and can’t argue that it’s not an engaging image… those eyes! But McCurry captured that engaging photograph as part of a bigger story, his aim was to illustrate how life was for Afghan refugees and it was that aim that motivated his photography.

I think it’s worth examining what our own aims are when we set out to photograph people we don’t know. I believe that too often the aim of many photographers amounts to little more than getting a close-up shot of an exotic face. Tightly framed, we want that McCurry shot, we want our own Afghan Girl. The fact that we’re in Thailand and photographing a street vendor and not in a war zone engaging with a refugee is irrelevant – “this face looks different from my own and the folks back home will think I’m Steve McCurry when I show them how close I got”. No, they won’t. The folks back home will wonder why the lady in your picture has an expression half-way between a smile (because she’s trying to please you and offer a happy expression) and terror induced by the fact that you’ve just shoved a 200mm lens in her face.

OK, I see a precipice ahead so let me back up a little before I leap off the edge and descend into a rant. We need to examine our aims. We need to understand our own motivations and appreciate what the driving force is behind our desire to photograph people in public. Is it about us, or about them? Are we hoping to get a picture with which to impress our family and friends with evidence of how adventurous we have been or do we wish, sincerely, to tell our subject’s story? I’ll repeat it because it’s a good mental check to consider when you’re about to pick up that 200mm lens, “Is this about me, or about them?”.

Too often, I see visitors photographing the streets and markets of Thailand as if it were a kind of Disney World, a series of set-pieces laid on for their amusement and entertainment. The market traders and street vendors are sometimes viewed as if they were out-of-work actors, hired to populate a picturesque diorama, employed to assist in the visitor’s aim of capturing an “exotic” scene. I understand how this happens and I’m not being as critical as I might sound – honestly! The reassuring observation is that there are just as many photographers who want to engage with their surroundings and who seek to locate and explore their experiences before attempting to take photographs.

So, in an attempt to find a point with which to conclude this rambling post, the answer to the question “How do I go about photographing people in public” is to point out that there is perhaps a more pertinent question to be asked: “How do I go about making the people I wish to photograph feel comfortable and confident?”. By turning the question around, we are no longer concentrating on making ourselves feel comfortable but instead putting the focus back where it belongs, on our subject. The first steps to creating engaging street portraits are to put the camera away, to be friendly, to smile, to make eye-contact, to engage and to invest some time understanding our subject (I prefer to say “new-found friend” but it’s an awkward phrase to get into a sentence) and, above all, to acknowledge what our own aims are.

Perhaps our vocabulary needs to change in order to reflect the better path – instead of “capturing” an image or “taking” a picture, perhaps we should instead be “sharing” an exchange or “creating” a shared moment. Either way, you might not come home with an image to rival McCurry’s “Afghan Girl” but your pictures of street vendors, monks, parents and children will have the sort of honesty and integrity that might really impress the folks back home.

P.S. The image at the top of this post was taken in Fatehpur Masjid in Old Delhi – I hope that it conveys this man’s very warm expression and calm demeanour. I spent some time talking with him before asking to take this image and his was among the series of prints that I took back to the mosque a couple of days later, to give to some of the people I had met there. It forms the first image seen on the home page of this updated web site design.

Posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 12:04 pm. Filed under: Blog, My work Tags: delhi, fatehpur masjid, india, portrait, street photography RSS 2.0 feed.