Often not pressing the button is the right thing to do

An interesting comment to this journal entry from reader Arun asked:

“What is the etiquette of photography – can a person, such as the subject of this photograph have any expectations of privacy? What if one caught a person in a moment of undignified pose, should one not publish such a photograph? Could a parent not want a random stranger snapshotting her children? And so on. If one is wandering around with one’s camera, searching for shots, what boundaries should be respected?

This is probably a culture-specific question, so what are the rules in America?”

In a 1964 case tried before the US Supreme Court, Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

I know it when I see it.

And that’s the thought at the back of my mind when I take street snaps. Obscenity or bad taste, they are much the same, sharing adjacent positions on the continuum which is culture. Arun limits his question to the US, but maybe it’s as fair to substitute ‘Western Europe and North America’ for ‘United States’, as the social mores are largely similar.

Take my picture of Max for example. To most Westerners it’s a funny picture of a dog. Yet one Japanese commentator a while back took offence, describing the picture in generally pejorative terms and referring to it as a “…. picture of a dog sniffing a woman’s behind.” OK, so he doesn’t get it and the comment, laced with personal invective directed at me, seems hardly worth worrying about yet …. what may be funny to a Westerner does not necessarily work elsewhere. To this Japanese, the picture was in bad taste or somehow conflicted with his agenda. To the many Western photo editors who have chosen to reproduce this picture over the years, it was a bit of fun, a light-as-air confection. And the subject couldn’t be further from the interpretation of that vituperative Japanese commentator to my Western eyes.

So good taste, restraint and an appreciation of the cultural boundaries are good things to practice, but in a global community it is simply impossible to please all the people all of the time and, if your sole goal is to please viewers, then you are not a photographer but simply a user of a camera with a client – paying or not. This is why ‘professional’ photographers are not, for the most part, exemplars of quality, taste or great photography. The pictures are rarely their own, rather reflecting the desires of a paying customer. That’s not bad or good. It’s just fact. Extraordinary practitioners may shape taste and aesthetics becuse of a strong vision, like Hoyningen-Huene, but most commercial photography fails to reach these exalted heights.

In the Introduction to my first book, comprised of street snaps taken thirty years ago in London and Paris, I wrote:

“Why street photographs? It always seemed to me that the genre offered too much that was either humorless or contrived. Posed pictures trying to pass for spontaneity. Worst of all, much of the work out there was positively invasive when it came to respecting other’s privacy. Cameras cruelly stuck in the faces of the poor or destitute. Not for me. But make it spontaneous and inject a touch of humor and now you have a picture worth taking”.

And as for the limits of good taste well, like Potter Stewart, we all have our own built-in obscenity meters, with a dishonorable exception for paparazzi and those hiding behind the First Amendment and going by the dubious title of photojournalist. Their taste meters seem to be permanently stuck on zero.

We know it when we see it. At least most of us do.