In an unguarded moment, I binged both the documentary about photographing nanny Vivian Maier and the one about gunslinger Garry Winogrand on NPO.
The series “Close Up” is fantastic. Different documentaries, but with a clear common thread: lots of photos of lots of unknown people. Maier and Winogrand took so many (street) photos that they ended up leaving hundreds of rolls behind. Undeveloped rolls, photos that they ultimately never saw themselves.
Photos of stolen moments, important or insignificant. Moments in restaurants, bars, zoos. Selfies of shadows, reflections and families, whether their own or not. Entire shopping streets, events. People smoking at the nursery and swimming naked in public fountains. These were different times, even for the street photographer. Privacy meant locking your toilet door.
The common thread running through street photography workshops and lectures is that overarching question, “Is it all right for what we, the street photographers, are doing now?”. It almost feels more important than the creative process. “Is it even allowed?” The fear that someone will soon say to you that he/she/they don't want to be photographed and what you then think you are doing with your camera.
The same people who don't consider 24-hour camera surveillance in car parks, shopping streets and on beaches. “What are you doing? You have no right to take my portrait.” Partly due to the advent of the AVG and social media becoming commonplace, we are more aware than ever of our privacy and some would prefer to take it as far as possible.
A photograph, no matter how well and respectfully taken, has become a threat to that privacy, although we do not know exactly what that privacy now means, let alone what the effect of a photograph taken is. We pursue an ambiguous concept without wanting to see the big picture. Sure, some photos do not deserve the beauty prize, but we forget to encourage the photographers who help us capture moments we do not want to forget.
As an extension of complaining, Google stores every metre we walk and TikTok knows all about that naughty Whatsapp message to that one colleague. Whatsapp, so Facebook reads along too. We try to buy cigarettes on the sly and are captured on footage that will only be erased in a fortnight, with enough time to make a video on X, formerly Twitter, in order to catch a shoplifter. Right to track him down, of course. But that is not my point. There you are, at Opsporing Verzocht, clearly visible through your flashy watch, with your face made invisible.
It is with melancholy that I watch the aforementioned documentaries and wonder why these people did not raise the alarm in the past. Why there weren't mass complaints about the invasion of privacy by street photographers who would flash you pontifically in your face and sometimes earn upwards of a million from photos of people who had no idea they were featured in books, on t-shirts and in museums.
I think, in the grand scheme of things, that one portrait taken is so incredibly insignificant that people just didn't care that much. Not even when droves of street photographers gathered in city centres in the 1970s-1980s. It just doesn't matter that much. That one photo where you just slipped on a banana peel hasn't been taken yet, and it probably won't be.
In fact, if it does get taken, you probably won't even be recognisable in it. That photo of you walking through town with your boyfriend or girlfriend, ducking under your umbrella to avoid the rain, or having a quiet drink on a terrace with the sun right on your face, is actually quite a nice photo.
We are made nervous with a false sense of privacy and use that as an excuse to complain, get angry and seek a confrontation with the photographer. I feel the urge to take more photos. To look for people under a security camera, photograph them and ask which camera bothers them more. Which camera they fear more. I think of the artist Banksy, but realise that I cannot trade one privacy for another. It is not a competition.
I thought of street photography without faces, an impossibility. The field of street photography is too broad to limit yourself. Its documenting nature falters with the so-called fine art aspect. People make the city, with emotions and frustrations, with their smiles and grimaces. As we watch films, the city passes by the street photographer. Without today's protagonists, we don't understand the course of the film. We lack context. It becomes an out-of-story second slapstick, a petrified landscape picture without character.
I catch myself regularly talking to others about “interesting topics” rather than “appealing people”. Perhaps it is an unconscious way of getting around the hang of privacy. Not the law, but the sword of Damocles.
Of course I continue to document. Through lame excuses like journalistic and artistic freedom, I justify what has rapidly become an irreversible passion: documenting the now, in pretty pictures and staring eyes. They are not excuses for myself, but words with which I suspend the insecure extras. Reassure. I will gladly send you the photos.
I now document it by using my camera to find people who may or may not notice that I am taking a picture. In the firm belief that some of my photos will eventually be looked at in 50 years and someone will say, “Thank goodness we still have the photos.”
This article previously appeared in Focus Magazine (the best photography magazine in the Netherlands), for which I was allowed to write a column every issue in 2023 and 2024.
