Knowing What it Means to be Photographed
On an average day in 1934 a young man walks through a neighborhood in the outskirts of Mexico City, with a small discreet camera slung around his neck. The street is Calle Cuauhtemoctzin. The man stops at seeing two women, prostitutes, sticking their head out in curiosity, or boredom, from a frame-‐like opening of a closed door. They smile, maybe even talk to the young man indifferent to the camera he is holding. He casually raises the viewfinder to his eye, frames and snaps a picture and then moves on.
If you haven’t yet guessed, the man in this fictional account is Henry Cartier Bresson and the picture is Prostitute on Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico City 1934. Today we can scarcely imagine such indifference at our own attempts to taking a picture. As a travel photographer I travel the world, often to remote places and sometimes not so remote places to document my vision or a story. Over the years, however, I have found it more challenging to get a candid shot. It’s as if someone has ratted me out, they literally see me coming a mile away. Whether on a remote hill surrounded by countryside or a street corner in a small town people seem to be increasingly aware of the camera and what it means to be photographed.
Over the last 30 years, with the advent of cheap travel, it has become more and more difficult to find a remote place. And with the digital age in full effect, you find every traveler, backpacker and tour-‐bus jockey wielding a digital camera (not to mention a phone with camera capabilities). The amount of semi-‐ professional and professional photographers has grown exponentially and the web and its community sharing sites are flooded with pictures of “exotic” locations and Photoshopped portraits. The photograph, once a special window into a distant world has lost some of its ability to captivate in its simplest form. Images of places, people and disasters, aren’t novel in their own right anymore and we struggle to keep them unique and illuminating. We’ve become overexposed and psychic numbing has been one side effect.
What does this mean for photography? People that would have once shown indifference to the camera by your side are all too aware and self-‐conscious of the power of the picture. Some ask for money, some sheepishly turn away, some even strike a pose and others scream in rage at the intrusion of their privacy. It has become more and more difficult to get that candid shot or eyes filled with the emotion of the moment. As photographers we turn to larger and more powerful zooms and hidden cameras, we’re forced to become more aggressive and creative in finding and capturing shots and this inevitably has an effect on our environment and our style. Zoom lenses take us further and further away from our subjects, breaking the emotional tie. Becoming more intrusive in forming our shot creates an affront to the surroundings. We intrude on people’s personal space, changing their behavior. We lie in wait at corners for surprise attacks, angering them. We make friends to gain access to a place or situation all the while secretly fingering the shutter button. It has forced us to use predatory techniques; people become victims of our cameras instead of us being unobtrusive witnesses and documenters.
Almost everyone has heard of green travel and most people are pretty conscious about not polluting the sights they travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to see. But what about polluting the moment for others and yourself by breaking the fluidity of an experience? Isn’t the interruption of someone’s life a form of pollution? It destroys the snippet of another world we travelled to see by affecting the way people around us act. Seth Mydans in his piece for Lens Blog, “Too many lenses, to Few Eyes” perfectly captures this sentiment when he quotes a local artist saying, “Now we see the safari. They come in buses.They look at the monks the same as monkeys, a buffalo. It is theater. Now the monks have no space to meditate, no space for quite.” Nithakhong Somsanith is talking about the early morning procession of monks in Luang Prabang, Laos that has become a spectacle of flashes and tour buses rather than a magical moment to be witnessed in the tranquility of the early morning. In an age where people stop just long enough to take a snap and to be photographed provides necessary documentation of having been to a place or seen an event, travel and picture taking have become inexorably tied. We witness the world through our cameras like a third eye. Taking a picture of the procession of hundreds of monks is enough to justify the trip, the smaller details of the moment and the emotion are left to wilt away unnoticed.
What use is taking pictures if the very act changes the environment we are discovering? How do we as photographers continue what we do without afflicting the situation and our environment with our presence? In essence, how do we lessen our photographic footprint? Travel and photography impact people and we should be conscious of this and careful not to cross the very thin moral line that hovers about us like a haze.
The fly on the wall approach comes to mind: interacting with the environment in a less damaging way, knowing the culture and customs, etc. I try to move through neighborhoods without creating ripples, moving slowly and trying to become a part of my surroundings, assimilating. Sometimes I’ll sit on street corners for half an hour before touching my camera, saying hello to people that pass or interacting with curious kids. When I do start pulling the trigger on my camera I make sure that people can always read a soft smile on my face, making eye contact as often as possible. I’ll push for my shot but always try to remember where the line is, sometimes foregoing the picture when the camera creates a tension in my surroundings. When possible I’ll ask if I can take a picture, but more often I do not and instead try to show a polite smile or a nod of the head after the shot to ease the initial negative feelings that arise from being intruded upon. These are methods that I try to employ, and they don’t always work, especially when I find myself standing past that thin little line I wasn’t meant to cross. They were forged over the years from my style of shooting and undoubtedly aren’t for everyone. Some work just requires a more aggressive style and some photographers seek that tension in their pictures. There may not be any solution to the growing awareness and repulsion of being photographed and maybe just recognizing it may be solution enough. We photographers, professional or amateur, need to become more aware of our methods. We need to lessen the impact our presence and our camera has on the people and the story we are trying to document. And we as travelers need to remember to be witnesses to that beautiful sunset and take in the moment instead of taking a picture of it.
Editors Note:
All Photos are Copyright Marlon Krieger
Marlon Krieger (http://marlonkrieger.com) has been documenting humanity around the globe for ten years covering everything from war zones and refugees to celebrities and nightlife. His work has been exhibited in group shows and solo shows in New York, Hamburg and London. Marlon resides and works commercially in New York City.
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great images and post! Thanks
marlon——your photos captures the human spirit with most powerfull way.
you are a master in photography in movement.
dorit baxrer
Really great piece. Made me think about our modern obsession with photographing everything instead of enjoying living in the moment.
Great post. This connection between the subject and the photographer makes us different than the landscape photographers — those just consume, we are actually part of the image ourselves, the invisible one but undoubtedly present. Trying to hide the intents of photographing someone is like stealing; in certain conditions absolutely acceptable (reporting) but the magic of the moment will not be complete without us taking place in it.
I love your images. I think the most vivid and striking connection has been done on that image with those men (Cubans?) playing domino. It seems like you were actually walking that line you speak of not crossing. I can almost see what happened next – a mix of surprise, acceptance, almost ridicule and male macho-ism… And laughter.
Great article, Marlon! Your point about affecting our subjects & changing them reminds me of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s ground-breaking theory that the observer always affects the observed, that there is no way to be in a situation and …not change it. She spent time with many primitive tribes, & one can imagine her same frustrations with wanting to come away with a totally objective documentation of the people & events, but knowing that her presence there, on some level, had to create a ripple in the pond she was observing. Furthermore, she herself as the anthropologist, like us as photographers, had her own intellectual & psychological filters through which she perceived the people & events–and no matter how much we try to be unbiased, our photographs are always our own interpretations, determined by every technical and creative choice we make through composition, shutter speed, and depth of field. And I loved your description of “crossing the line” of comfort & trust with photographing strangers. In some situations, we have the time & luxury of creating actual relationships and building trust with our subjects; and sometimes, we want to just be that proverbial fly, which of course means we risk being an annoyance and swatted away…At what point do we just become paparazzi (literally “bugs”) in our effort to capture something without our presence being known? And is it stealing something that wasn’t meant to be ours? There is photography that is intentionally voyeuristic, and some that is wholly manipulative, wherein the photographer’s presence & hand is entirely part and parcel of the product. Thanks for a thought-provoking piece of writing…I hope I can use it one day when I return to teaching photography!! :)
A very inspiring article and excellent photography. It provokes me, to leave a few thoughts of my own.
Since Henri Cartier Bresson, the fight is raging about what is real, what is staged, what is manipulated, what is prettified and what is uglified.
Light is purposly or unpurposly your most important sidekick. If you reach the Favela one hour before sunset, because the taxidriver screwed up, your sidekick has already successfully bathed the whole scenery in a soft, disneyesque pool of light and awaits you with a proud grin.
Did the taxidriver screw up? Did you call him late on purpose? Or is, what happens when YOU arrive, reality?
Other cronies would be for instance: the sky – white clouds in a deep blue sky ruin every aspect of harsh reality, or shadows – the surreal drama of shadows in photography has it’s own artistic message.
The intrusion part is ambivalent in times of fast internet and digital media. Unless you wear your lens as a button on your shirt, you are immediately identified as the 15 – Minute -Man.
Maybe reality in today’s environment is created by cellphone pictures over the internet and professional photographers have become intellectually, artistically and politically dyed messengers? Which would make them artists. Which would end this discourse.
Excellent article! Wonderful points.
I always feel like a predator when I have my camera. But I think we as a society are becoming so used to everyone snapping photos on their cell phones that we are becoming more comfortable with photography. But when I whip out the big guns… my SLR or DSLR… people still get nervous and it’s right back to feeling like a predator.
Very true!
But I have also found a very sharp difference when shooting with DSLR compared to shooting with a semi-compact and when going for the candids the semi-compact is my camera of choice. People pay less attention and don’t ask “who are you shooting for?” – they’re less anxious when they notice a ‘non-professional’ camera, obviously making you a non-professional photographer.
In the end I find I am able to capture much more captivating images with the lesser of two cameras.
That’s a very good point Nir, I’ve even found that when I use my film camera, a Nikon n8008, people are less intimidated than when I come around with a DSLR. There is something very threatening about our large digital cameras with their big lenses. Thank you for sharing
Hi Marlon! Your article really got me thinking. Thanks for it!
Today I was just considering the future of photography, having literally everybody with a point and shoot camera, taking pics of whatever they find…Where are we going as photographers? What is going to be our job in the near future, beyond capturing images? Is photography a profession turned into a hobby? Is it a hobby turned into a profession? I wonder what will be the function of photography in 5 years time, when so many people take pictures of events, that even newspapers get hold of some of them in case their photographers couldn’t make it…Are we photographing humanity to understand it better? And if so, are we really getting the deeper understanding we say we are trying to get?
So many questions, so few answers!