Last week we had a great photography club talk from Brian Lloyd Duckett. Brian, apart from providing a superb photography club talk, is a wonderful and talented street photographer and gave great advice for anyone wanting to have a go with this genre.
One of the things he suggested was that we should watch the documentary "Finding Vivian Maier". After finding it on Amazon Prime, I heartily echo that recommendation. It was one of the most engaging, thought-provoking, and emotional roller coaster documentaries I have ever watched on photography and made me think really hard about my relationship with photography.
Just to add to small world theory, at the same time this article appeared on a popular blog page.
This was a timely reminder that of all the photographic genres, street photography is one thats divides photographers. One of the street photographers (although I am not sure that he would use that term) I greatly admire, Marc Davenant, chimed in on Twitter (For those reading in 2023. Twitter was a popular platform for expressing opinions :) )that
"This is a terrible take on the ethics of photographing people who are experiencing homelessness. It isn’t rocket science. There are virtually no circumstances where non-consensual photography of homeless people on the street is acceptable or ethical."
While I hate to argue against people I admire and who probably had more time to form a reasoned opinion, I do also have a low tolerance for definitive black/white opinions on subjects that has a lot of greys. It is something I have thought about a bit, so I felt it was time to tie my colours to the mast (too many colours metaphors- Ed)
256 Shades of Grey
As I said, opinions on street photography, even among photographers, are very polarizing (see what I did there :) ). Any article on somewhere like a site such as dpreview on street photography, will result in a fair proportion of comments saying things like street photography should not be allowed in any circumstances. Even of those that concur that street photography as some value as a genre, will put some caveats that some should be prohibited. These are not the kind of discussions you generally get on say landscape photography.
The dividing line seems to fall on one's perception or feeling about on how much an individual's should expect on a right to privacy.
There are also various cultural barriers to be considered. In live in the UK and the law is clear that in public there is no automatic right to privacy, while in other places it can be a legal minefield, going from general acceptance to chemical castration (looking at you South Korea). These in many ways echo the societies view of privacy. Even in the UK, there are some who feel that street photography should be banned altogether, or at least require an element of consent (ignoring the legal complexity of such a law, enforcement, and logistical impossibilities of consent of everyone taking an image). There is also the consideration that people seem to make a distinction between mobile and camera photography.
One of the other problems with street photography is the tendency for it to be conflated with other less salubrious photographic endeavours. In the public eye there seems a short step from genuine social photography, to paparazzi, tabloid journalism, and even worse, things like up-skirting. That is even before we consider the ethical issues of taking pictures of minors. In many ways, taking pictures of homeless people and children are lumped together and while in the UK, it is not that it is illegal to take pictures of either without consent, whether it is ethical to do it is left to the photographer's own conscience and moral map to provide an answer.
However, there is a counter-argument.It can be argued that a well taken, considered street photograph is in itself a far more important and valuable document than one taken in any other genre.
A street photograph can capture the changing face of society, and the eyes looking back at us ask us questions about are own mortality and our place in the world.
When I think about the images with the most impact, it is not Ansel Adams, etc that I consider, but the Diane Arbus's, Dorothea Lange's etc. These individuals captured images that more than any defined a point in time in society, in a way that no other medium could possibly hope to capture. For example, You would have to be a Conservative MP or a Fox newscaster not to feel strong empathetic emotion to images such as Migrant Mother.
Great street photography allows you to look into the eyes of another soul, and makes you ask questions about yourself. A long time ago I did a video called Ghosts of Castle Donington, after finding a book of old photos of the village I lived in. While it was fun lining up the old images with the modern village, what really spoke to me was the people in them, all long gone, whose steps I was following. It was a way of making sure of their spirit lived on.
It also often the only evidence that an individual ever existed. Some of the power of Vivian Maeir's photos was not that they were taken of the rich and famous, but they were often of those who formed the underclass of society, unseen and unwanted, but each individual a vessel containing their own love, hates, desires and wants. Street photography is at its best a leveller because it elevates the common masses. (It should also be said that the curse of street photography is that it's value is often only really measurable long after the image was taken)
Also, at its very best, street photography can be a powerful tool for social change. If you are lucky (lucky??- Ed) enough to go to North Korea, you are restricted about where you can take photo's, because the authorities want to control the narrative and it will ruin the curated image of a socialist paradise. Photographers such as Dorothy Lange work also showed the world the devastation of the depression on working people, and highlighted that the people affected were real, not just faces in a crowd. Such images have become a powerful totem in the battle against ideologies which belittle or downplay individuality.
For these reasons, street, social or whatever we may want to call it is invaluable and so are the rights to express it.
However, we still have the question, as to how far you should be allowed to go. Should there be limits, either legal or through forced social pressure, about which images you should be allowed to take?
Let's start with the statement that there are virtually no circumstances where non-consensual photography of homeless people. Whenever I hear such statements, my brain cannot start with thinking of counterarguments.
For example, what if someone took images of all the homeless people in London, and played them on a continuous loop outside the House of Commons in an effort to improve social conditions. Would the greater good outweigh the loss of privacy of the individual? I think most of us would agree that it would
Therefore, my biggest issue with such arguments about whether homeless people should not be photographed is that in doing so, it creates a form of censorship. Do we want future generations to see the world around us as it truly is, or in a watered down North Korea way, only what we find morally acceptable?
Going back to the original article, the author made it clear that the purpose was not to take images of homeless people, but to put them in the context of the disparate society they lived in, and in some way to highlight the issues in a society that seems to abandoned them. I really cannot see the problem with this, and I struggle to understand the anger with such images. I have less of a problem of people taking photos of the homeless than I do of the fact there are homeless people around to take photos of. In short, why shoot the messenger.
However, I agree that there has to be boundaries. My red line is when images of homeless people are taken to primarily profit the taker. If you are going around taking images of homeless people purely to fill your portfolio or to sell books, then your moral compass needs re-setting. When we take images of anyone, we must first treat them as human beings and not objects.
In the end, these moral questions are messy, and it is up to each individual to work their way through the maze. Personally, in these situations, I fall back to the good book.
But not the religious type. (Omnipotent deities seem to have remarkable little useful to say on the moral dilemma's of modern artistic mediums.)
Instead, I refer you to late great Terry Pratchett
There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin.
