Ethics of photographing in public places - beaches example

Norma Desmond · August 16, 2013

"There was some talk about journalists being invited to the photo session by an intended suicider and whether they should or shouldn't have gone."

It's likely the Judeo-Christian sin/guilt paradigm that invades our culture's sensibilities and would cause those journalists and others judging them to think in terms of shoulds rather than in terms of wants. Shoulds make it so much easier, because they usually come from someone else or some other place, like a set of stone tablets. Wants tend to force us to take responsibility.

charleswood · August 16, 2013

The 'Should' may compare to the alpha male baboon in my earlier example, but internalized. For the journalist, it may be a matter of asking herself "Do I want to participate or not." I normally assume that 'should' refers to a want, the female baboon wanted the treat and knew about 'Should' and about consequences, her want and its legitimacy in conflict with the group and the group enforcer. Not to say that I'm a "You Should, but I want" kind of person, well, hmmmm.

Norma Desmond · August 16, 2013

Interesting, Charles, just the opposite for me. I normally see shoulds as the avoidance of wants and turning over the responsibility for a choice to a higher power, or at least another power. We might reach some sort of happy medium, though, since a should may often be an attempt to shirk responsibility but choosing something as a should may suggest one wants to do it anyway but wants to give it the supposed force of an outside authority. It may just be a matter of where one wants the credit or blame to get laid, with oneself or the moral authoritarian.

If the journalist decides to shoot the suicide because he thinks he should, he might feel differently about some eventual consequences to his actions than if he keeps it simple and does it because he wants to.

The photographer shooting people going into gay bars because he feels no moral imperative not to might just feel differently about a soldier suffering anxiety when that soldier becomes aware of the photographer shooting him. He might relate to the situation differently if he doesn't use the lack of a moral imperative against doing so as a rationale superseding his desire to take such pictures. "I wasn't doing anything wrong" is easy. "Look what happened partially as a result of my own desires and actions" may be a little more difficult to face.

charleswood · August 16, 2013

Fred I think we see it the same way, though you are expressing it better. Huck Finn may be a good example, Huck accepting damnation for wanting to and continuing to help Jim where the societal dictate to re-enslave Jim was immoral for going against an inner authority grounded in our cooperative, compassionate, and sharing natures.

Norma Desmond · August 16, 2013

Yes. Got it. We were approaching it differently but saying pretty much the same thing. Thanks.

cyanatic · August 16, 2013

From John Nell to babboons, punctured canteens, and accident prone localities. What a long strange trip it's been.

I got nothin'.

aplumpton · August 18, 2013

can you or anyone here think of some photographers who successfully did the opposite, who shot a community as an "outsider" and got a compelling outside perspective?

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Fred, have you considered August Sanders? His subjects were German as he was, but their social positions or interests were apparently not his and he shows them often in an original manner. As the type of photography he was practicing was a form of portrait photography it might not meet the more spontaneous candid street photography type of example that many have been discussing here. I think of Sanders somewhat as I do of Atget - intelligent and curious observers of their subjects, whether animate or inanimate. I can be impressed by Karsh's technical prowess but I don't see him as being divorced or an outsider to his talented (and famous) subjects. But I cannot think of other outsiders except Sanders. Not even the farm administration photographers, but why I'm not sure, and I am open to being corrected about Sanders as I have little knowledge about his personal life or connections or his knowledge of or familiarity with those he was portraying.

I have been reading (for the first time) some of the comments in recent weeks and many are certainly interesting and palatable or worthwhile; and thanks to Julie for taking the opposing view to the mainstream of opinions (and the latter is not meant as a derisory classification).

Julie H · August 18, 2013

August Sander is problematic. From The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900, by Max Kozloff (2007):

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"… as an example of the direst misfortune, The Foster Mother– Sander’s <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/sander_fostermother.jpg">photograph of a group of children from the Düren Home for the Blind</a> — is unrivalled. [ <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/sander_fostermother.jpg">LINK</a> ] … As they cannot imagine how they are construed, or even the meaning of the occasion, the subjects are knowingly defenseless. They fidget or squint in an uncomfortable ripple of petulance that belies their static grouping. The gulf between them and the viewer opens up far more widely than any division marked by class, income or ethnicity, for it is established by disparity of condition — the fact that we can see and they do not. Nature has taken these children into darkness, over which the sighted nun presides, and their irritable obedience shows the power she has over them."

</blockquote>

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************

" ... [sander] had rejigged images from his stock in trade, combining them with others taken specifically for the book, to produce a kind of reading of the German world through a typology of its faces.

"Since it was meant to elucidate representative beings in a contemporary environment, this reading no longer had anything to do with individuals. Forget the fact that someone would have known the sitters intimately as Uncle Otto or Cousin Erika; they now appeared at large, as personified citizens whose import only the public could decide. Instead of being referred to by their names, they were identified by their professions or trades. Instead of being regarded as specific characters, they were treated as demonstrative components — of a system vast and amorphous. In the process, Sander denatured local, commercial portraiture, his own genre, with a vengeance"

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On the other hand, Kozloff takes the following as a negative. I don't necessarily agree. While I think it's the locus of the issue we're talking about, it is *because* it has the powers that Kozloff circles, that it may be (is!) used to make either wonderful or awful street pictures:

.

"These photographs are simultaneously robust on a pictorial level and yet, thanks to his conceptual schematism, psychologically detached. Rather than being engaged with the sitters’ performance, the photographs are about the performance — a thing that Sander studies as if it existed by itself.

"The studiousness, as we see, was affected by a wishful scientific methodology. Where commercial studios would have tried to play down the subject’s jitters, piggishness or humility with little decencies or white lies, Sander welcomed such guileless reactions to his presence as signs intrinsic to class identification. An objective purveyor of signs does not care about the sensibility of others. It flourished or wilted, regardless of templates he thought incontrovertible. … Sander’s rejection of conventionally benign address marks a decisive break in the history of portraiture, one that cannot be emphasized enough."

"… To his sitters of moderate or unassuming status or no rank at all, Sander’s presence, and his interest in theirs, might have been baffling. But it is an interesting issue because, in comparison with the self-presentation of those higher up the social scale, their comportment often looks improvised or ill-defined. In other words, they reflect their knowledge that they were taking a chance with this camera-wielding stranger, be it in a field or on the road. For his opportunistic eye, the tremor of this knowledge would still have been a social discovery, richer than most because of its anomalous content."

</blockquote>

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Compare Sander to Arbus (from an essay, The Question of Belief by Sandra S. Phillips in the book, Diane Arbus: Revelations (2003)):

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"… What distinguished <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus">Arbus’s</a> work from Sander's and that of her contemporaries was her intense interest in the way her subjects saw themselves and the mutability of their personae. As she noted, Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw … Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect."

</blockquote>

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There's the risk, the question of fairness (exposing that "gap") that Arbus is sensitive to (she knows the power is there); that Sander, according to Kozloff, uses, extracts from his subjects without regard or interest in what it does or means to those subjects.

charleswood · August 18, 2013

Kozloff - "… as an example of the direst misfortune ..... As they cannot imagine how they are construed, or even the meaning of the occasion, the subjects are knowingly defenseless.

I think Kozloff is wrong: blind children aren't an example of direst misfortune and blind children can well imagine how they are construed because they judge the gap between their intention and effect like everyone else does. Blind isn't stupid. Kozloff's intention is to say something valid about Sander and ends up saying something essential about his own false impressions of blind children, finding special meaning in blind kids being fidgety and petulant when there isn't special meaning there because all kids are fidgety and petulant. What Sanders was trying to do with fidgety was emphasize the performance aspect of sitting for a photograph, nothing more. So much for Kozloff: "The gulf between them and the viewer opens up far more widely than any division marked by class, income or ethnicity, for it is established by disparity of condition..." Maybe for you Max, maybe for you.

charleswood · August 18, 2013

Anyway, I don't see, and perhaps Julie can explain how Sanders is problematic as it sounds like he took photographs of subjects who gave their permission.

Kozloff - "Sander’s rejection of conventionally benign address marks a decisive break in the history of portraiture, one that cannot be emphasized enough."

Why, because he was the first to intentionally take portraits of people when they weren't all posed and looking their best?

Kozloff - "But it is an interesting issue because, in comparison with the self-presentation of those higher up the social scale, their comportment often looks improvised or ill-defined." Right, people who self-present for a portrait look different in their pictures than subjects who don't self-present and aren't prepared to have their picture taken. "My hair isn't done, I'm wearing my old shirt, etc."

Kozloff makes much of that "baffling" difference, being baffled soooo indicative of class and social standing, the unprepared subject of no rank, mind racing as he/she attempst to understand why they should be a subject at all: "What, me? You want to take my picture? Me? Huh? Well, yes, yes your highness, go ahead and take my picture then. I'll chance it, I'll just chance it even though I be a trembling at just the thought of it."

Kozloff: "...richer than most because of its anomalous content." Remembering how my aged great aunt posed rigidly for even a movie camera, she no doubt would have seen Sander's portraits as the work of an inconsiderate photographer, capturing "making ready" the way the 8mm movie camera caught hers. I prefer to think that Sander just liked to mess with people for the fun of it, rather than that in his mind there were such lofty perceptions (choke) as Kozloff's.

Isn't it in painting, not photography, that commoners who couldn't pay for a sitting appeared?

cyanatic · August 18, 2013

Briefly, in the context of Fred's question regarding photographers who may have been considered outsiders in a particular area they photographed, I have a hard time seeing Sander's catalogue of various German social "types" as being the work of an outsider.

Unrelated to Sanders or Kozloff, but related to the notion of "ethics" in photography, I was looking over a book of Louis Faurer's photography this afternoon and came across an excerpt of a letter he had written to Allan Porter, editor of Camera magazine at the time. Rather than have to type it all out from the book, I found it mentioned on the blog linked below.

<a href="http://webbnorriswebb.wordpress.com/tag/louis-faurer/">http://webbnorriswebb.wordpress.com/tag/louis-faurer/</a>

The MFA Houston book of Faurer’s work by the insightful and thoughtful Anne Wilkes Tucker, includes a wonderful passage from a letter written by the photographer to the then editor of Camera Magazine, Allan Porter, in December 1974. Faurer, who was known, among other things, for his sympathetic photographs of people on the fringes of society, reflects on an incident in which he missed a photograph of a destitute man in the New York subway. Interesting how sometimes the photo not taken gives us a different kind of picture of a particular photographer’s process, body of work, and even, sometimes, as with the passage below, his humanity.—Rebecca Norris Webb

Slowly I walked down the slope leading to the second lower level platform. Was it because I was not courageous that resulted in a miss? Because I could not further humiliate him? Was this cadaver-like man with no direction beyond the need for food, thought, and love? Again, the thought came to my mind, was I cowardly? Had I become a counterpart to this man? Hadn’t I been pacing, darting aimlessly, without direction, like the man? Later I related the incident to several people. I said, perhaps I thought I was he, maybe I was afraid of myself, but I wanted to think that he had experienced so much pain and anguish that additional injury to his once felt dignity was not possible and that I could not risk accepting the guilt. Or maybe from way back I heard Walker Evans once say to me, “You wouldn’t photograph a fat woman, would you?” and he might have added “and hurt them?—Louis Faurer

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Julie H · August 19, 2013

Thanks Steve. The Faurer quote is beautiful.

I've been cranking out so many negative vignettes of street shooting, I thought it might be nice to give a really nice one -- specifically about beach photography -- from Ray Metzker (ca. 1978). But I have to point out, and ask that you note, how wonderfully aware, sensitive, and familiar Metzker is with his subjects:

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"Beachgoing is a public ritual directed by the rhythm of the sun. At first, the territories staked out are little more than random claims, and people occupy them with a tentativeness and display a propriety born of knowing that strangers are only an arm's length away. They may have gone to the beach in the spirit of looking and being looked at, but they cannot hide the vulnerability of bodies unaccustomed to exposure. Slowly, as the combined forces of sun, sand, and sea begin to penetrate these restraints, the daytime homesteaders begin to domesticate their spaces, making them extensions of their personalities. Bags open and the contents emerge. In time, the blanket becomes a private room. And even in the absence of walls, these denizens become as comfortable and revealing as they would be on their own sofas or beds.

"Surrendering in the heat, some doze, others abandon themselves in deep slumber. Arms embrace, legs entangle, hands move with or without purpose in endless variation. The ones who make periodic forays to cool themselves in the surf, return falling on their blankets. Long before the day is out, they become inhabitants of the beach -- creatures of the sand.

"To take a walk along the beach, gathering unguarded moments, became a consuming fascination for several summers. Each season I would return thinking the last photograph had been made, only to discover another treasure. The many experiences became a unity although each image is a fragment, a scene glimpsed en route and quickly sketched with a half-frame camera that passes for a tourist's toy. What appears in the pictures was the subject's decision, not mine. I took what they presented -- delicate moments -- unadorned and unglamorous, yet tender and exquisite.

"If you take the walk, you'll know what it's about."

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When he says "What appears in the pictures was the subject's decision, not mine. I took what they presented -- delicate moments -- unadorned and unglamorous, yet tender and exquisite," he gives the subject the decision. He does not take what they don't offer. It seems to me that he is specifically outlawing what Arbus called "the flaw" ("You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw." -- Diane Arbus.)

Further Metzger to back up my supposition: .

"It is not a question of what one chooses to do, but how one does it; not whether it is intellectual or emotional but whether it is inventive, enriching, or caring."

"Familiarity breeds nuance."

</blockquote>

.

"If you take the walk, you [should, ethically] know what it's about."

<hr />

" ... there seems to be much about modern cities which of itself arouses in artists a sensitiveness, in particular, to the tensions and desolations of creatures in naked space." -- James Agee writing about Helen Levitt

Again, I think it should "arouse .. a sensitiveness" ...

Norma Desmond · August 19, 2013

"What appears in the pictures was the subject's decision, not mine."

Not my decision: there's an ethics for you.

I will try not to make unwitting street subjects responsible for my decisions and not look for my own sense of ethics in the words of Metzger.

charleswood · August 19, 2013

"It is not a question of what one chooses to do, but how one does it; not whether it is intellectual or emotional but whether it is inventive, enriching, or caring."

So it is not a question of whether one puts a camera on one's shoe to capture underwear, not a question, have you, as to whether or not intellectual or emotional that act of putting of a camera on one's shoe to capture underwear: for the artist's question is whether or not in the final analysis that act of putting a camera on one's shoe to capture underwear is in and of itself an inventive, enriching, or caring act. If inventive. If enriching. If caring. Then it matters not your honor, where one's inventing, enriching or caring may lead you and especially it is not a question of what you as an artist then do.

Seems to me that for Ray, Arbus' flaw would be fair game.

G-P · August 19, 2013

Interesting tips that touch on this subject from a PN article back in 2009.

<a href="/columns/mjohnston/14-tips-for-photographing-in-public/">http://www.photo.net/columns/mjohnston/14-tips-for-photographing-in-public/</a>

cyanatic · August 19, 2013

<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=6309921">Glenn Palm</a><a href="/member-status-icons"><img title="Admin" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/admin.gif" alt="" /><img title="Subscriber" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub3.gif" alt="" /></a>, Aug 19, 2013; 01:42 p.m.

Interesting tips that touch on this subject from a PN article back in 2009. <a href="/columns/mjohnston/14-tips-for-photographing-in-public/" rel="nofollow">http://www.photo.net/columns/mjohnston/14-tips-for-photographing-in-public/</a>

</blockquote>

Yes, some interesting tips there. The one about flipping open your wallet as if you're a cop cracked me up. A bit over the top, eh?

Brad_ · August 20, 2013

>>> Interesting tips that touch on this subject from a PN article back in 2009.

Some good tips. Some characterizations that are not particularly true. And some tips that are really bad.

Perhaps he doesn't shoot candidly on the street a lot?

Julie H · August 20, 2013

Vignettes far from the beach:

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"With Some Afrikaners Photographed it was a case of tough love. I believe I looked with real affection, even with love, but at the same time critically, and this was very uncomfortable for a lot of Afrikaners.

"I experience a hunger for recognition in almost everyone. With the exception perhaps of people who are often in the public eye and are now blasé about it -- we all like to be noticed.

"I've learnt with photographs that if I've done my job properly I haven't made judgments for the viewer. They've got to find their way into the picture and often, what they find is not what I saw.

"Generally speaking I haven't had any serious problems that I can recall of people I've photographed who've then become aware of the publication and felt that I've betrayed them. I learnt pretty early on that one of the things I had to be very careful to do was to honor my declared intentions."

[ ... ]

"At the beginning of the Particulars book, there's a picture of a young woman in a very short mini skirt. She was a prostitute and I saw her in Fordsburg sitting on bench ... I came up to her and said, 'I think you've got beautiful hands. I'd like to photograph them." And she did have hands that I liked, but it was the combination of her hands, the miniskirt and that little roll of fat that women have at the top of the thigh that I find very sexy, and is very womanly. But I didn't want to go into all of that detail. She said, 'Well, 20 cents.' And I said, 'No, I don't want to pay, I think you're beautiful. I just want to photograph your hands.' And she said, '20 cents.' So I said, 'Well, look, I'm sorry then. Don't worry I'll leave it,' and I started walking away and she said, 'Alright.' And then she said to me, 'Come, let's go to Swaziland.' [To escape the apartheid law prohibiting sexual intimacy between whites and blacks, some would slip across the border to neighboring countries such as Swaziland.] And I said, 'Thank you very much, but I just want to photograph your hands.' And then finally she said, 'Ag, such a nice man.' So yes there was an element there of concealment, I suppose."

— David Goldblatt

</blockquote>

.

"Grand Wizard Tom Robb told me where and when they would have one of their rare cross burnings, or rather 'cross lightings', as the cross is a shining beacon for a world astray."

[ ... ]

"A quarter of an hour later the cross had almost gone. Then they all turned towards me and I feared the worst, as I had flashed a lot during the ceremony. But instead of knocking my camera away, they gave me their own pocket-size cameras and posed before the cross. All the Klansmen's left arms were raised -- not the right arm like the Nazis, the left one is closer to the heart -- and they remained upright until all the pictures were taken. I took about twenty for them, and my own camera was the last I used."

— Carl De Keyzer

</blockquote>

.

"At the very moment that I took this photograph, one of the white policemen in it was firing at me with birdshot. I collapsed, while he shot me a second time with lead bullets. I got about thirty in my legs, arms and chest."

" ... As I was lying on the ground, covered in blood and with my left arm swelling hugely, I hoped somebody would take care of me and take me away (the police were still shooting).

"When the incident happened, there were three of us photographers present. None of us knew each other. The Gamma photographer disappeared, but the Reuters one came over. I am very grateful to him, but his first reflex was to 'shoot' me! He took several pictures of me down, then he and a black guy took me to a nearby square ... I have often thought about that photographer's reflex and asked myself what I would have done."

— Patrick Zachmann

</blockquote>

.

[Correction to my post of yesterday: where I wrote 'street photography' I should have said something like 'shooting strangers in public.' Street is a subset of that.]

Allen Herbert · August 26, 2013

I think it is very important that photographers can record the world as it is...a bastion of freedom to my mind.

Restrictions on photography are never healthy and are usually used by repressive regimes with a lot to hide. The lot to hide is usually about hurting folk and filling their own pockets with gold.

The moral question of "please don't take my photo in a public place" speaks to me of vanity of the individual. Perhaps they should forget the personnel vanity and direct their emotions to the many oppressed and poor in the world.

Helping them would be a lot more deeply satisfying than the obsessed vanity of constantly looking up ones arse.

Julie H · August 27, 2013

Allen, it's not about "restrictions on photography"; nobody is talking about limiting public photography per se. Ethics is about how/why it's done. If you don't know anything about the person or people you're photographing, maybe you should take the time to learn something about those people, first, and then use what you've learned to make meaningful imagery. Photographing "the poor" and "the oppressed" without knowing anything about the particular persons shown is based on the vanity of your personal assessment.

Furthermore, if you abuse the "vanity" of the average man/woman-on-the-street (presumably not poor or oppressed), eventually all that they will show you will be a reinforced and hardened face of pure vanity; vanity will be all you'll get. The public learns. Absent ethics you get an arms race.

Allen Herbert · August 30, 2013

. "If you don't know anything about the person or people you're photographing, maybe you should take the time to learn something about those people, first, and then use what you've learned to make meaningful imagery"

Thank you for offering me advice on how to achieve meaniful imagery and be a better person. Do I have join something and wear special clothes? Not very good at the chanting stuff but I will try;)

"Photographing "the poor" and "the oppressed" without knowing anything about the particular persons shown is based on the vanity of your personal assessment"

Really. So I need to understand everything about the individual before they are photographed.

"Furthermore, if you abuse the "vanity" of the average man/woman-on-the-street (presumably not poor or oppressed), eventually all that they will show you will be a reinforced and hardened face of pure vanity; vanity will be all you'll get"

Sad thought but I always ignore vanity. Sorry if that makes me a bad person.

Allen Herbert · August 30, 2013

Neither do I buy into the argument that because I'm gay or black /white I have to hide what I am because I might get abused by morons.

Norma Desmond · September 1, 2013

I was able to come out at an early age and have never looked back. I have compassion for those gay people who haven't had and still don't have that luxury, sometimes as a matter of their livelihood or military service, sometimes as a matter of life and death. To those in small towns throughout the US who haven't had it as easy as me, to those in Russia being persecuted for who (not what) they are, for those in Uganda where the death penalty has been proposed if you're gay, I understand your having to hide who you are and stand by you in the struggle to be treated as a human being.

It's not an "argument." It's a reality. And no amount of idealism will protect you in certain situations as well as being discreet. The latter, every gay person knows.

Lest I be misunderstood to be "arguing" for staying in the closet, I'm not. I'm advocating compassion and understanding for a variety of reactions to oppression. Some will break down the barriers and come screaming out of the closet. Others cannot and will not do that. Gay people are not a monolith. They live in a variety of cultures and situations, including a variety right here in the U.S., face different enemies and dangers, and will and should react in all sorts of ways. More often than we would like to think, it is a matter of survival, not merely photography.

Allen Herbert · September 4, 2013

Laurentiu, I don't agree. Worry and anticipation can cause great harm. A soldier seeing himself photographed going into a gay bar could very well have suffered great pain and personal harm, worrying about and anticipating what could happen because he'd been photographed. The film could stay forever in the camera

If I drive a car I might run a child over.

Best never drive.

If you are mostly a naked women on a beach men will look and take photos. That is a simple reality unless you live on another dimension of your own fantasy. Forget cameras and think cell phones. "It's not an "argument." It's a reality. And no amount of idealism will protect you in certain situations as well as being discreet. The latter, every gay person knows"

Yes, I understand. Persecution of the minority the stain of humanity.

But you are playing to their ignorant beliefs giving them power over you...forcing you to hide in corners.

In life , despite the costs, you had to stand up and be counted otherwise the ignorant will control the many.

Look at black folk and their courage.

Allen Herbert · September 4, 2013

Cannot hide if you are black.

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