In 1950 a young actress named Françoise Bornet and her boyfriend kissed in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris so that Robert Doisneau could photograph the kiss. The photo became famous and brought Doisneau lots of royalty money. Decades later, Bornet sued him for a share of the royalties, because she in effect had worked with him to get this shot and she won. This was a posed photo, in other words. But its fame was built on the assumption that it was a snap shot.
The spontaneity of the kiss in Times Square on VJ Day in 1945 is debatable. Is the nurse really surprised? Yes, notice how she’s pulling down her dress. No, notice how she’s closing her eyes. The sailor was tracked down later. His name was Glenn McDuffie. He said, it was spontaneous, he just saw her and grabbed her. Others recall that he had been walking through the festive crowd and whenever he saw an attractive young women he kissed her. In this scenario, it’s easy to imagine the photographer, Alfred Eisenstadt, walking ahead of him, ready to document his next kissing impulse. The photo would not exactly be posed, but it would be anticipated. In any case, Eisenstadt did not ask his two subjects for permission to take the picture.
Anticipating the next move is what Henri Cartier-Bresson (1909-2004) was great at. He must have been watching this couple out of the corner of his eye –and his camera—in the certainty that they would kiss sooner or later. We can be sure that he did not ask them to act out a kiss for his him. We can also be sure that there was no paperwork involved.
I’m not a flaneur ( flaneuse?) like Cartier-Bresson and our café life in Chicago may not be as picturesque as that of Paris in the 60’s, but when I take the CTA and the Metra my tiny camera is always at hand because while I’m pretending to read the New Yorker I’m actually indulging my passion for people-watching. In response to my post of July 19, a thoughtful reader suggested that I be sensitive to the privacy of the people I photograph and ask permission before I click that shutter. Let me attempt a defense of photography, possibly as an art, but certainly as a way of making images that has been with us for about a hundred and eighty years. I photograph in public because the ordinary strikes me as beautiful. A fleeting moment, unconscious, unposed, not intellectualized, just breathtakingly beautiful. The moment often involves people attending to their unconscious, unposed chores and diversions. My camera is not accusing you, it is not judging you, it is merely recording you as you present yourself. Nor do I show the photos in a context that would denigrate the anonymous person in the photo. I can only say, if you are exposing this much skin—in public–it must be because you want to be seen this way. As for the belief that the camera sucks out your soul, surely we can’t cling to that superstition any more, even if we could define those words. I photograph in public because, well, because it’s all there.
Really enjoyed this blog posting Katherine! You have made some excellent points….certainly the issue of privacy is a subject of great concern, but anyone who lives in or near an urban area, has to know that they are being filmed by surveillance cameras more often than we realize….our conversations, emails, phones calls are all monitored or able to be, so we have “lost our souls” to the Big Brother in the sky, on our phones and in the computer long before another artist took that aspect of our lives away! Once you logged on to the computer today, or used your cell phone, or went shopping in a mall, your privacy flew out the window!
and yes, the ordinary is beautiful!
I wasn’t really suggesting that you ask permission; just that this is uneasy territory for me, precisely because our privacy is invaded so continuously by public and commercial institutions.
Also, my experiences in life have taught me the hard way NOT to assume anything about another person– e.g., why a person dresses in a particular way. Even in this relentlessly intrusive age (especially in this intrusive age?) the other person is far more mysterious than we want to assume. And casting the encounter as collusion (‘wants to be seen’) goes down another uneasy road where I don’t want to travel. I say this in full recognition that YouTube seems to evidence a lot of ‘colluders.’
We all (I hope) are struck by countless, breathtaking, fleeting moments that we encounter in daily life. But, religious questions aside, ‘capturing’ a moment (consider that phrase) involves something gained by you and perhaps something lost by the other, even if your capture is relatively ‘innocent’ compared to the institutionalized intrusions. If I’m suggesting anything here, I guess I’m suggesting mindfulness on the part of the artist regarding the capture, precisely because the artist is not a governmental or commercial institution.
We don’t see the way the camera sees. We see and experience a continuous motion. The camera sees an instant. This is the fascination of photos. You were at the party, laughing and dancing, and then you see a photo of yourself laughing and dancing and it’s a totally different experience. It’s unreal. That’s why we stare at photos: not because they capture memories or some reality—I don’t think they do—but because they remind us of how “unreal” we are. By unreal I don’t mean phony, I mean something closer to fleeting, ephemeral. In that instant, the nano-second the photo was taken, anything could have happened and your life and consciousness could have taken a drastic turn. The photo reminds you of that. Because it disrupts the cause-and-effect context of the action, the photo shows you in a moment of isolation, in a private moment. It’s a paradox, isn’t it. The camera appears to intrude into your privacy, but the resulting photo will show you as deeply private. For this reason, clicking the shutter may make me feel sneaky and clever, but the resulting photos always makes me sad.
You’re right, Maggy, people don’t necessarily “want to be seen this way.” They may be so absorbed in their private preoccupations, that they lose awareness of their appearance. I do think, however, that the city people I photograph have carefully dressed themselves that morning in accordance with the fashion of the day and that they are fully aware of being seen and they know they can’t rule out the presence of fellow travelers with cameras. I don’t think the act of being photographed is a violation of privacy; but how the photo is used, could be.
“The camera appears to intrude into your privacy, but the resulting photo will show you as deeply private.” A good paradox, well express, and it helps explain my discomfort.
In the current New Yorker (Aug 9) David Sedaris describes some of the fellow-citizens he has to stand in line with at airports. In the context of our conversation about privacy, let’s consider extremely accurate verbal descriptions? Are they a violation of privacy? I think we would say, no. But why?
I think David Sedaris’ descriptions stand in the same relationship to his fellow queue-mates, as an Edward Hopper painting to a person glimpsed through a window. And a photograph can stand in the same relationship to the object as a taped recording of a conversation.
Meaning……..what? I’m not sure. Visually or verbally, the human process of ‘description’ involves a lot of editing, is limited by the the describer’s vocalulary (or other skill sets), reflects an individual point of view and would never be mistaken for ‘the real thing’ whatever that is. A 3rd-party viewer/listener would never consider that Sedaris’ description is ‘found’ as-is. Is a description (in the sense I’m trying to articulate here) an invasion of privacy? I think the answer is no because no one would mistake Sedaris’ description or a painting as ‘the real thing.’
I’m trying to think this through as I go along here, but I guess it has something to do with this quality of ‘found’ vs ‘staged/edited’. Although we know that photos and tape recordings can be staged/edited, they carry with them this ‘found’ quality (unstaged, unedited). Which is ironic given the instances of editing and alteration of images and verbal statements that are highlighted in the media on a regular basis.
I’ve taken this as far as I can right now–tossing the ball back to you.
See! This is why we make art! We’ve always made the stuff (pick your medium, music, sculpture, painting, poetry) and nobody has figured out why we do this. The why question has been in the writings of philosophers for centuries. Plato was against it all because it made people impulsive and passionate and he wanted the behavior of citizens in the polis to be predictable. Kant, Hegel…oh,please. I’ve always though philosophy was just bad art. This is circular reasoning, I know. Hello? Any philosophers out there willing to weigh in on this?
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