The Unobserved

Here’s a personality test, quiz-style. You’re in the street, shooting. You frame a shot – a slice of life – but almost immediately your subject turns and looks at you. Do you….

A: Give up and look for another subject
B: Shoot

If A., you’re a traditionalist, a believer in the principle of the unobserved witness and the skill of being able to work that way. If B., you could be one of two things – either you acknowledge that the presence of the photographer (you) is part of what photography is all about, or you got frustrated and accepted second best. The difference in result is, of course, huge. Large enough that I’m going to split this discussion into two parts; I’ll do A. this month, and B. later.

St. Peter’s, Vatican, 2009

As soon as the combination of camera and film became small enough and fast enough to give photographers the freedom to shoot the activities of life going on around them, candid photography exploded. The time was 1924-1925, when first the Ermanox camera with a remarkably fast ƒ1.8 lens was launched, then the Leica, using motion picture 35mm film.

The Ermanox camera, launched 1925 with a fast, ƒ1.8 Ernostar lens

Erich Salomon with the Ermanox and Henri Cartier-Bresson with the Leica exemplified a new approach to documentary photography, one that persists until now and that until the 1970s was largely unquestioned. The ethos is one of skillfully capturing events without being noticed. Without appearing to disturb or influence the events being shown. Emphasis here on appearing, because as any student of quantum mechanics knows (Schrödinger’s cat and all that), the presence of an observer tends to change things. Difficult to pull off every time, this became the classic form of photo-journalism, the camera as an unnoticed witness, yet the images captured being ones of telling moment. Expressions and gestures caught on the cusp. The viewer is projected into the scene very much as if a fly on the wall. The understanding is that the view is privileged and natural, of people behaving as they normally would and yet the moment caught is somehow apt. I won’t drag up decisive moment again because it’s a rather over-used term, but in this scenario the moment the photographer chooses is not a random one.

As this is a Techniques article and not an Observations page, let’s look at the means available for photographing people when they are not looking at the camera. Immediately, we have to distinguish between situations in which the subject does not know he or she is being photographed (although they may realise soon after what just happened), and situations in which the subject knows you are there and has no objections to you continuing to shoot.

Candid, unobserved

In street photography in particular, the moment snatched is a single one, probably unexpected even to the photographer, whose skill has to include rapid reaction. The most common scenario is that you choose a location that you hope is likely to offer some picture opportunities (varies according to taste and accessibility), set aside a vague or precise amount of time to walk around it, and hope for the best. Unplanned though this may sound, it should also involve anticipating how a situation may develop, particularly in likely actions and reactions. If there’s time, it should also include imagining how a scene may frame from another viewpoint and with a particular focal length.

Techniques can embrace the whole gamut of behavioural and social skills, which are probably infinite, but narrowing things down to the photographic, they include the following:-

• Simple dexterity and familiarity with the camera; settings at what you think you may need (hardly a technique, but good preparation). At the very least, you do a fast scan of the camera settings so that they are roughly appropriate. Obvious thought this is, it’s easy enough to forget and leave settings from one picture situation (say, small aperture and low ISO from just having made a deep-focus architectural shot) that won’t do for the next (maybe wide aperture and high ISO).
• Dress, behave and move ordinarily. Think ‘anonymous’. Cartier-Bresson famously preserved a manner of complete ordinariness so that he could work without attracting attention, and refused under almost all circumstances to be photographed himself. As he wrote, “If you have made yourself obvious, even by just getting your light-meter out, the only thing to do is to forget about photography for the moment”.
• When shooting close, keep the camera down and not obvious until the moment, then rely on being able to frame and shoot instantly once (or just a short burst), then move on. Working constantly on the the first point in this list, above, makes this possible.
• If your subject(s) are occupied to the extent that you think they are not paying attention to you, shoot until the point at which he/she/they become aware of you. On some occasions, what they’re doing may be so involving that they pay no attention at all, and in an upcoming interview with National Geographic photographer Mike Yamashita we’ll see a particularly strong example of this; on others, you may have just a few seconds. If you do this, you have to be prepared to deal with the post-situation, which may mean smiling apologetically or whatever seems appropriate. Not all photographers are comfortable with this, but much depends on the situation and on whether you think your just-photographed subject will object or just not mind. Or indeed, on whether you mind other people minding!
• Aiming off with a wide-angle lens. If you shoot with a wide-angle lens from very close, it may be possible to appear to be shooting beyond your subject towards something else while framing them well off-centred. If you want to feel comfortable while doing this, you could look beyond them, not at them. A variety of this is to angle the camera quickly towards them for the shot, then back.
• Long focal length from a distance. A relatively easy option, and the longer the focal length, the further away you can be, and so less easily noticed. The disadvantages are unwanted things crossing in front of you, and the cooler, less involved character of telephoto images.

Some examples of the above…

Lord Mayor’s Show, London, 1977 — A basic case of shoot-until-eye-contact, them move on. In this instance, a few frames.

Coffee shop, Port Sudan, 2003 - With a wide-angle lens like this 24mm efl, and the frame composed like this, it actually appeared to be aiming to the side of the young man nearest the camera. In addition, the camera was held at ground level.

Athens, 1977 - The sort of framing you can expect across the street with a 180mm lens, and it puts a distance of almost 10 metres between photographer and subject.

This situation may, sometimes, develop into the next, below. This is if, after the initial surprise at having been photographed has faded, your subject is prepared to ignore you and let you get on with it….

Tolerated or accepted

But perhaps I should have titled this article The Apparently Unobserved, because there is a completely different situation that on the face of it delivers similar results, with the subjects carrying on about their lives as if the camera were invisible. In this, the photographer is ‘declared’, but in one way or another has gained the confidence of the subject.

This is, of course, a kind of extended portraiture, for which Cartier-Bresson’s advice was that “Above all, the sitter must be made to forget about the camera and the photographer who is handling it”, and an underlying technique for achieving this, having gained a first impression, was for the photographer to “try always to substantiate the first impression by ‘living’ with the person concerned”.

Again, there are different techniques for bringing this about:-

• Asking. Actually a risky strategy, not simply because you may get a refusal when just having taken a picture or two quietly might have worked, but because once people are alert to being centre-stage for the camera, they may just as easily start to behave unnaturally, and then you’ve lost it all.
• Situations in which photography is expected. There are any number of events, particularly ones in which people dress up or perform at something, where photographers are more or less welcome. Unfortunately, more and more of these tend to be managed and even sponsored events, with less freedom to look for the different.
• Spending ‘camera-down’ time. This really is the best recipe for extended coverage. The longer you are able to spend just getting know the people or person you want to photograph without a camera raised to shoot, the easier it will be for you to enter their lives. An excellent, well-known example of this is the 1948 picture essay by W. Eugene Smith that ran in Life Magazine as ‘Country Doctor’, and is available to view on the Magnum site here

And a couple of other examples of the above…

Shilluck dance, Malakal, Sudan, 2004 - a case of there being too much going on in the crush and noise for anyone to care about a mere photographer.

Darra Adam Khel, Pakistan, 1980 — I lived with these Momand Pathan for a month in Northwest Frontier Province, and after a few days was, at least for the duration, a part of the family. Investing time is by far and away the best way to shoot naturally without pressure to snatch images.

Akha village, Chiangrai Province, Thailand, 1981 - a second case of spending time, here a three-month assignment with a single Akha community in the days before mass tourism hit Thailand. I lived in the village.

In part two of this article, The Returned Gaze, we’ll look at how to deal positively with that scourge of traditional reportage photographers – eye contact.

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