Because anyone can take a picture

It had been a lousy day in the market, I confess. America is sitting on $1 trillion of mortgages sold by the corrupt to the stupid, which will presage a recession. Maybe a depression. Wall Street is busy hiding the losses until year-end and even then auditors, judging by their stellar history (can you say Enron or WorldCom?), may well not notice that all that debt is being valued at 100 cents on the dollar.

Let’s face it. Wall Street is a professional contact sport and, like all professional sports, is rigged. You thought those nice young boys in the Tour de France were just taking their vitamins?

So when I sat down for my five weekly minutes of prime time news (I have only so much time to waste on fiction) what did I see? A bridge had fallen down in the mid-west and there were no CNN (the “Certainly Not News” channel) journalists on the spot to cover the event. Now this was an event made for ‘news’ reporting, for it had everything that a non-newsworthy event can have. Personalities, not issues, tragic loss of life, dramatic pictures, politicos with arms outstretched palms up, etc.

But what I saw was no less than startling. The first reports were accompanied by some incredibly dramatic still pictures. No, not from your local photojournalist (whom I define as someone taking newsworthy snaps for money) but by amateurs at the scene. They were mostly using cell phone cameras. I very much doubt they were paid. Likewise, all the ‘reporting’ was done not by reporterettes with breast implants and Botox lips, but rather by people who lived close by. And their reports were intense, focused and moving. They were not returning to New York that night to dine at a swanky restaurant. They have to live with this thing.

And, yes, there was no mention of the looming recession and the global tragedies it will bring.

So who needs photojournalists anymore?

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.