Last night, we found ourselves on the corner among others waiting to cross the street. We’d spent the last several hours taking photos and, at this point, it was too dark to carry on. Our camera was still slung around our neck, our hand still - out of habit - resting lightly on the button that makes pictures happen. Our camera’s lens was unintentionally facing a group of people who were in the midst of an animated conversation. We faced the street. We paid this laughing, quasi-yelling huddle no mind until they suddenly stopped talking. The unexpected quiet prompted us to turn and look their way directly. We recognized, on looking over, that we were maybe somehow to blame for the interruption. Or, rather, our camera was. One person very deliberately looked at the camera and then at us and then back at the camera. The look was poised somewhere between inquiry and accusation.
Had we taken a picture of them? No. But they didn’t know that and fairly clearly suspected we had. We thought about just telling them that we hadn’t taken their picture, but figured that that would be a very suspicious thing to just blurt out. Saying you haven’t done something unprompted always seems to be a tacit admission of guilt. We thought about explaining that the light was such that - even if we’d wanted to - any picture of them we took would be so grainy and dark that they’d be rendered indistinct and nigh unidentifiable, but that definitely felt like far too much specific information to share voluntarily out of the seeming blue. They, also, seemed to think about asking directly whether we’d taken their picture, but maybe thought that it would be very egotistical to assume that some stranger had snapped their pic merely because they had the ability to do so. They maybe stopped wondering whether we’d taken a picture and started to wonder why we’d taken one.
Maybe they thought or figured or wondered nothing at all about any of this. They merely clocked the camera and that was that. We couldn’t tell, just by looking, what exactly was going on with them just as they couldn’t tell, just by looking, what all we were up to.
Other than a few quick glances, we kept ourselves to ourselves and they kept themselves to themselves. They didn’t say anything to us and so we didn’t say anything to them. For what felt like a while, we were all seemingly yoked together by the fact of the camera and the possibility of a picture. We stood on the street corner together for a little while longer until the light changed and liberated us from one another’s uneasy company.
Walking the final half dozen blocks home, we considered this non-interaction around a photo that didn’t exist. The most interesting and fraught part of it was that we knew that we absolutely would have taken a picture of these strangers talking had the light been better. That we didn’t, in fact, take that specific picture was - kind of - beside the point.
To wit, about half an hour earlier, we took this photo at a different street corner waiting for a different light to change.
The person in the Lakers jersey did not seem to care that we were taking a picture. We were feet away from them. They walked directly into the frame. Assuming that they’re familiar with what cameras are, what they do, and how one operates one - then they were aware that they were in or could have been in the picture we took. So, they ended up in a picture we took. Or, rather, we ended up with a picture of them.
It feels wrong, though, to say that they are in anything or that this is a picture of them. They are incredibly out of focus. They are a person mostly because we’re primed for gestalts, we look to perceive people-like patterns. No one - ourselves included - could use this picture as documentary evidence that such and such a person was on such and such a corner at such and such a time. There’s nothing sharp or specific here. It’s all fuzzy colors albeit fuzzy colors organized in such a way that we do not have to work very hard to piece together the scene.
Now, while it feels wrong to say this is a picture of the person in the Lakers jersey, it also feels wrong to say that it is not a picture of the person in the Lakers jersey. They are clearly an element of the picture in the same way as the streetlights, cars, street, and some buildings are. So…
Had the person in the Lakers jersey asked us if we’d taken their picture, how would we answer? Sort of? Not exactly? Yes, but…? More importantly, what would this person be asking about? Would they be asking about the intent behind our action or the product that results from that action? Would the situation change if we had only taken the blurry image accidentally? Would it matter if we’d intended to capture their face in focus, but they moved at the last moment and our finger slipped and suddenly fucked up the camera settings? All these questions, we’re sure, seem excessive. Whether one ought or ought not take a picture of strangers in public is likely a matter you have some intuitive feelings about. We’re, though, curious about what’s going on with that intuition. We feel, truly, a certain sort of way about taking pictures of people in public without their permission. We don’t tend to do it at all. Or, rather, we don’t tend to do it in such a way that the people appear identifiably as themselves.
Often, we keep them blurry, ill-defined.
Or we ensure that their faces aren’t visible.
It’s unclear if this is better than the alternative. It’s also unclear if it matters whether the decision we make in regards to the subjects (?) of our photographs are motivated by aesthetic or ethical considerations. Is there a meaningful difference between capturing a blurry face because we feel it might be visually interesting or because we feel it might be morally better? Is the idea of distinguishing aesthetic and ethical attitudes just a helpful fantasy? [Kierkegaard? You there?] Are we (likely) overestimating the seriousness and importance of all of this? After all, aren’t well all background figures in each other’s social media posts? Don’t we all have walk-on parts in surveillance feeds all over the place? Maybe this is all very trivial. We should just do what we want to do and sort out the consequences if/when there are some? Maybe. But we can’t help but feel that there’s more there. We can’t help ourselves sometimes from getting hung up on how we ought to orient ourselves towards others while engaged in art or journalism or whatever you might call the thing we do here every once in a while.
We’re not much convinced by the arguments usually deployed for or against taking pictures of folks in public (i.e. that one voids the expectation of privacy in public, that one has a proprietary right to one’s image) - but all the same we’re not entirely comfortable just taking pictures of whatever is there for the taking. The ambivalence or uncertainty that underlies our feelings means that sometimes we take a picture, then promptly delete it. Likewise, we have taken pictures we would never share with others. These feelings - the OKness or not-OKness of the picture - are strong and clear, but the cause and rationale for those feelings is amorphous and ill-defined. We really have no real idea why these feelings are so strong or upon what they’re premised.
When we take pictures of people, we are very much using them as stand-ins. Who they are in any real sense is not only irrelevant, but distracting. We have little interest in preserving anything about them as individuals, but rather want their shapes, figures, and colors to pull together a scene in a certain kind of way. They help establish what we hope is an impersonal feeling, a kind of available shared resonance. We’re trying to capture, as best we can, a mood or feeling of being in the city and they are something less than character that works to establish a mood. They are an abstract shortcut between you and the world as it appears in the image. They gesture towards an idea or affect that, perhaps, you’ll get (paradoxically?) in some immediate way.
We could, we suppose, be accused of using people merely as a means which (we’d agree) isn’t great - but then again we’re not really using people merely as a means but their image. The people in these photos - for the most part - are entirely unaffected by and ignorant of anything that has happened. Does this make things better or worse? We don’t know. Who are we defending ourselves against here? Again, we don’t know. It does, though, feel like there is something to be defended or explained or laid out more clearly.
Taking pictures always feels mostly like probing a set of problems that we haven’t yet and might never resolve in any satisfying way. It causes us to think about people in a certain sort of way, consider the space we share with them differently. Taking pictures brings absolutely nothing into focus. It, instead, reminds us that we spend most of our time among others in the world unthinkingly. We experience things with the guarantee that the specifics of those experiences will fade away, that the exactness of the scene will not be preserved. We take that impermanence for granted. We flit into and out of spaces alongside and with them without much special consideration. We are, to each other, something less than passersby in each other’s lives, but the camera and the pictures it takes suggests that there is or can be something more in these transient moments. We have no desire to capture anything momentous or special. We think, even, that photography as a medium is ill-equipped to deal with broadly significant events. It is, on the other hand, exceptionally good at highlighting the mundane, idle, forgettable, and passing moments of life. Better than depicting assassinations or revolutions, pictures do remarkable work setting down the things no one would much care to see or look at otherwise. They make discernable the benign meaninglessness of most of our time. This seemingly fundamental feature of our days is what we most want to somehow preserve. All the things we did not think to attend to, the matters we did not consider worth considering.
If this sounds pretentious or romantic, we’re going to pretend we’re OK with that. In a landscape so often seemingly screaming at us to attend to only five important things and having a psyche bent uglily on ourselves and our future, it feels necessary or good or urgent to work towards shifting our attention to all the interstitial and open stuff in the present that does not or cannot matter or make much of a difference. Most of our days, after all, are spent between things - between people or events or actions - and we lose all but the exceptional in due course. We would like to gain some of the unexpectional back, would like to keep parts of those immaterial parts of days.
We try, of course, to do this same work with words. As with the pictures, the effort often feels like a failure and encumbered with many unanswerable questions. At the root of both, really, are basic questions that we rarely dare ask, namely, why are we doing any of this? Why are we looking to turn our experiences into something else? Why share them? What value do these small moments captured hold for us or you or anyone? Is there any benefit to this? Any harm? Does the former outweigh the latter? Vice versa? How could we tell?
These questions aren’t exactly scary, but they aren’t comforting. There are moments even - while writing or whatever - that we think that all this activity, all these attempts at representing and sharing matters with you are just evasive maneuvers that allow us to defer answering those questions, enable us to spending time creating without pausing to consider that there might be no because at the start or therefore at the end. The hope is always that either by doing the work of writing or taking pictures or whatever it is we’re up to, we will happen across an answer to those questions or those questions will cease to matter. It hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. We keep - without reason or justification - trying to put ourselves out there in some form or another and, by putting ourselves out there, hopefully find you out there with us, too.
All the means by which we try to arrest the moving world and everyone in it - words, images, etc. - are (we know) incapable of arresting it finally. This is part of the agony, we suppose, but also part of the fun. The agony prompts us often to give up trying to accomplish things and merely live out our days. And the fun, just as often, spurs us to experiment with other means and invent other strategies to get at what we’re trying to get at. Maybe all we’re trying to do is testify that this - just this - once was, somehow, briefly like this. Not exactly like this, but, yes, sort of just like this.
The complicated knot of aesthetic and ethical issues regarding photographing and writing about people we do not know (or even those we do) might not be something we can untangle finally, but that might have more to do with the fact that living alongside others - sharing, say, streetcorners with them - often and only means trying one’s best to navigate territory that you can’t really see just by looking.
We are sorry, honestly, if we make mistakes or cause any discomfort, but we’d be equally sorry if we didn’t try sometimes to hold onto some of all that is happening around us by whatever imperfect, problematic, or questionable means we have at hand in that moment.
"Is the idea of distinguishing aesthetic and ethical attitudes just a helpful fantasy? " and what if there was no "because" no real raison d'etre to / for anyt... thing.... probably we don't see life quite so bleakly or cynically but levity is helpful too, some middle way probably is where comfort and purpose meet.