I found a new photographer today, someone pretty well known in Instagram street photo circles, but previously unknown to me. His name is Jeremy Paige and he goes by eatenbyflowers.
His photos are often confrontational. His website is headed with “It’s Easier to Ask For Forgiveness Than It Is To Get Permission”.
Eatenbyflowers made me think of my own street photography. I see folks like Jeremy and many others doing things so brave and brazen with the camera that the act of taking that picture becomes the art itself. It’s like performance art where the performance is getting an inch from someone’s face and taking a picture.
This picture is a good example.
When I see photography like this, I feel an urge to follow suite. I feel like I need to run out the door, waving my camera around, dancing around people, like a weird jester. It feels like a dance, street photography, when it works. It feels transgressive, too, rude and offensive and even unethical, like a thing only a priviliged person would do. It’s like the old idea of a photograph stealing the person’s soul somehow.
I sit with these feelings, the urge to do something that I also feel I shouldn’t, something impolite, something that actively disregards other people’s feelings and rights about being (or not being) photographed. I sit with the feeling that I fundamentally dislike Bruce Gilden, as a person, solely for the way he photographs people.
Then I think of Martin Parr.
Parr does a lot of similar things. He gets close, he photographs people he thinks weird, he laughs at people with his photos. (Often he laughs with them, but he laughs at, too.) But Martin Parr seems to be a nice, kind, loving person. He laughs like you laugh at a friend spilling a drink on themselves. It’s the joy of witnessing a loveable, fallible human being.
Looking back on this era we live in, we will probably call it the age of AI, or the dawn of AI, or the something else of AI. But AI is for sure at the core of what’s changing and how. So is social media, so is post-truth, so are many other things that all result in the same thing: something being true isn’t enough anymore. It might not even be relevant.
The various branches of documentary photography (photojournalism, street photography, etc.) have long relied for their value on the fact that they show some form of truth or reality. It’s interesting, because this person actually exists. It’s interesting, because this place in the mountains of Kazakhstan exists and looks like it does in the picture, at the same time that I’m sitting in a different place, looking at the picture. But something being real doesn’t matter anymore, or at least it doesn’t make an image special or interesting in any way.
So what happens to documentary photography when the fact that it documents isn’t enough anymore? I think Gilden, and Winogrand, (and a little bit Parr, too), and many others point us to an answer: the interaction between photographer and unwitting subject, between photographer and life is what makes it something worth looking at.
Like performance art.
So at the end of this, I am here, having convinced myself that the thing I deep down want to do and also feel I shouldn’t, is actually the ONLY thing, the MOST valuable thing I can do. Neat, huhh? Probably a coincidence.
Well, anyways.