Street Photography - Living with the Guilt and Other Nonsense

Living in a Box

Do you know we mostly don’t see what is out there? Or rather what we tend to see is what we are looking for. We rarely see beyond our initial filtered perception of things. Fear keeps us closed off.

The level to which we can push through our discomfort is the level that the streets are going to begin to open up for us. For me, street photography is all about seeing beyond our filtered perception. Alert awareness is essential. If we are victims to fear and thought then we exist inside a kind of box. We also get into feeling guilty about taking photographs of folk without their permission. But we’ll deal with guilt later. Let’s deal with perception first.

Beyond the Filters

We are actually living in a kind of matrix. Yes. Like the film. What we mostly perceive out there in the world isn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth? It isn’t. What we are seeing is filtered by a veil of fear and uncertainty. What we are seeing and experiencing is a projection that is informed by the limitations of our point of view. This spills into our work so that it rarely lifts beyond a kind of mediocre entry-level perception. I’ve seen beyond any doubt that what I feel and how I see the world reflects totally in my work … all of the time.

So how do I see beyond this filtered perception?

We have to go beyond our fear. We have to face what it is we are scared of head-on. It is then that fear will temporarily dissolve. The surface layers of perception will fall away and that is where the juice is. Of course nothing has actually changed on the physical realm. The streets are the same. The people in them are the same. The shops, the weather, the play of light is the same but when that shift occurs everything looks totally different. We don’t need to change what is outside of us to make better art we simply need to change our stance in relation to it.

A False Presumption

I have also seen that most of any fear I am experiencing, or rather why am I experiencing it, what I’m scared of, is not real. It feels real for sure but most of the time it’s based on a false presumption.

Take the images in this blog post. This guy was on the streets had just woken up when I came upon him. On the surface, he was very aggressive but I hung in where perhaps a lot of photographers would have carried on walking. Within 2-3 minutes, the guy was just happy to be photographed. He was enjoying himself and we had a chat and kind of hung out for a few minutes before I did eventually move on.

If I had not have pushed through my discomfort and hung in there my experience of this guy would have been vastly different from what it was, which was that he was simply a sweet guy down on his luck.

GUILT AND False Reasoning

I almost forgot about guilt. Another thing people do to offset that feeling of being inappropriate, GUILT, as a consequence of taking photographs without getting permission, is they come up with a reason for doing it. i.e. this is a project I’m doing for the homeless. This is mostly a device we use to offset our considerations about doing it. We develop a false reasoning. There may be a genuine reason for our doing what we are doing whereby someone else is benefitting from it, I have no doubt, but the reality is we are still taking photographs quite often without the other person's permission. Beneath the smug reasoning the reality is we are doing it because ‘WE’ want to do it. We don’t want to admit that because we don’t want to entertain that horrible guilt feeling.

I don’t like the word guilt. It’s an error. A glitch in the matrix and often guilt comes up because we think we’re doing something wrong based on what some third part, often religious, has said we are.

But we do often feel guilty right. We do. We shouldn’t and we do. Sometimes guys … we just have to live with the guilt.

Just a thought

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