Introvert's Guide to Street Photography — Photographing Strangers, Part 1
Tips and tricks for photographing strangers (and kicking off the holidays with 30% off subscriptions).
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This week, I’ll also be opening and re-sharing some of my most popular paywalled posts, starting with Part 1 of my Guide to Street Photography.
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My social phobia kicked in when I was about 14 years old. An unfortunate combination of puberty, badly spoken English, and sudden weight gain (an émigré from the Soviet Union discovering pizza! soft drinks! & hot pockets!!) will do that to you. Most public encounters were an excruciating ordeal. One time, I fainted in front of my classmates during a presentation. I never went to prom.
When, 15 years later, I decided to become a documentary photographer, social anxiety remained the biggest hurdle. How do you photograph people if you are afraid of them?
My first street images were mostly of sleeping people and side shots taken with trembling hands. I thought they were poetic. Bruce Gilden, infamous street photographer and my mentor, thought otherwise. He immediately recognized them as evasive and timid. I can't quite recall if he used the word "trash" or I imagined it in my hazy moment of defeat, but I do remember I cried. Defensively, I whipped out the social phobia card expecting sympathy. What I got was possibly the best advice of my career. "Who cares?"
"You either get over it or get out of the game." Bruce never minced words.
For the next few weeks, I was hysterical and despondent, working on the epitaph to my nascent photographic career. If only, like many skittish introverts, I liked to shoot landscapes. But the only reason I got into photography was to satisfy my intense curiosity about human behavior. The camera was my passport to participation in social life that I so desperately wanted to be a part of. Giving up would have been tremendously anticlimactic.
I decided I had no choice but to get over it.
That took me about a decade.
Photographing people who are unaware of being photographed is tricky. The challenge is to avoid those covert side angles without being so obvious as to alert the subject. If the latter happens, the situation switches from candid to evasive/confused/angry or, my least favorite, posed (if you ever meet me on the street and want to avoid having your picture taken, give me a thumbs up and a smile). The kind of photos I wanted to make — both unposed and in-your-face — required me to position myself squarely in the person's view. Initially, just the thought of such a setup made me feel queasy. However, the key to success lies in finding the right recipes for every conundrum. In my case, the specific recipe turned out to be half a Xanax and two shots of bourbon.
Setting out to photograph in the Meatpacking District, I came prepared. The beginning of the night was usually spent pacing, observing, gathering up my courage, and waiting for the anti-anxiety pill to kick in. That first picture was always the hardest. A jolt of handshaking adrenaline flooded through the body, disorienting and then refocusing the mind. Fortified by a drink from my flask, I continued to photograph strangers as excitement replaced any lingering fear. By the end of each night, my social anxiety flattened into a distant memory.
Over the course of three summers shooting in Meatpacking, I concocted a few rules for making candid images without being noticed. If you have any ethical issues with sneaky street photography, you should probably stop reading here.
Rule #1. Never make eye contact. The moment you lock eyes with your subject, it's game over. I acquired X-Men level peripheral vision, allowing me to pinpoint the needed moment.
Rule #2. Deflect attention. I don't shoot with a telephoto, so I am often just a few feet away from the subject. There is no way for them to miss my gargantuan camera the size of a large watermelon. So not only do I avoid eye contact, but I also make sure to appear focused on something entirely different. Like that super interesting building number above the subject's head. Or an incredibly fascinating trash can to their right. A person’s instinctual response is to follow my gaze, turning their head for just enough time to snap the image.
Rule #3. Stand your ground. This is a hard one but works remarkably well. If I want to photograph a scene versus a fleeting moment — a couple cozying up on their date or young women eating pretzels by a hot dog stand — much more time is needed than Rules #1 and #2 allow. To get the photo, I stand there for an uncomfortably long time, shooting, looking away, looking at my camera. Eventually, people get on with their lives, becoming either bored of me or convinced they are not the subject of the photo (since no one has that much hutzpah). The moment they fall back into their groove, I take the shot.
Rule #4. Smoke and Mirrors. I like to hone in on people whose attention is absorbed by something or someone else. They are so distracted that I could be standing two feet away and be miraculously invisible. In the Meatpacking, such opportunities abounded.
If any of this made you slightly uncomfortable, that's fair. Street photography is not for those with a sensitive moral compass. After all, you ARE taking images of people without their consent. American writer and intellectual Susan Sontag famously labeled most documentary photography as predatory and voyeuristic. But that's a rabbit hole I am not jumping into, at least not now.
A photographer will choose their preferred method. Some are a bit sneaky — see Walker Evans's hidden lens in the coat to shoot subway riders or Philip-Lorca diCorcia's remote-triggered lights on street corners. Others, like Bruce Gilden, are unapologetically inches away from the person's face with a flash. Somehow, the end result makes people much more uncomfortable with Gilden's work than, say, that of Saul Leiter, who used a zoom lens. The in-your-face approach is arguably more “honest," even if it looks more intrusive.
But what, you might ask, are the legalities of taking — and publishing —portraits of strangers? Is it legal to photograph children? People visible inside their homes? Stay tuned for Photographing Strangers, Part 2.
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I love this! In college, a friend and I were having dinner on the outdoor patio of a cute little restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor. An older man started photographing us from across the street (which was well within his legal rights). Afterward, he crossed the street and came up to us and introduced himself as a street photographer. He found us fascinating (we looked "different" and had tattoos), and he gave us his business card so we could see the photos on his blog. It completely eliminated any weirdness, and I actually became good friends with him after. I bought his book of street photographs from Cuba, and he came to my senior exhibition when I graduated. He was always super supportive of my photography. I always thought the way he introduced himself was such a cool way to diffuse what might have been an otherwise uncomfortable or awkward experience. Plus, I loved getting to see the photos he took of us!
About 15 years ago, I was out one evening at a local ice cream shop. The lines were long, and the golden evening sun illuminated the faces of people waiting for their turn. It was a perfect setting, and I began taking candid photos of the scene. At one point, a three- or four-year-old stood nearby, holding a melting ice cream cone. The father knelt beside him, gently wiping the drips from his face, while the mother stood just behind them. She appeared to be watching them lovingly—or so I thought.
After about ten minutes, I decided to leave, but as I drove away, I was suddenly pulled over by five police cars. One of the officers informed me that someone had reported me for photographing children. What had been an innocent moment of street photography quickly turned into a tense situation. I offered to show the officers my photos to prove there was nothing inappropriate, but one of them initially declined. I insisted, scrolling through the images on my camera to demonstrate there was nothing to be concerned about. After seeing the photos, they relaxed and let me go.
Later, as I reviewed the images again, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: the mother wasn’t looking lovingly at the father and child. Instead, her gaze was fixed on my camera, her expression subtly protective—a “mama bear” look that I had misread in the moment.
Having been a street photographer since the 1970s, I’ve witnessed a significant shift in how people react to being photographed, particularly with the rise of smartphones and the Internet. Today, I still do street photography, but it’s no longer candid. I now approach people and ask for their consent. While this means I often miss the decisive, spontaneous moments that once defined my work, it also means I no longer face angry confrontations—or the looming threat of police intervention.