cards and usually have hundreds of pictures on my card, so if I had to show someone what I had been shooting they could see that 99% of my shots were exclusively of adults. Whereas a film camera is a mysterious black box. I have produced a series of seaside photos with virtually no children, even though the British seaside is seen as a very family-oriented place. But what can you do?
YING: In China, parents don’t just allow you to take pictures of their children, they even try to stage a shot for you because it is seen as an honour, not a sign of planned kidnapping. MARK: Some people pose their kids here too, and are generally obliging and friendly, but the paranoia people feel about the camera is always present. JESSE: I haven’t taken a photo of a child on the street in about five years. The last time I did a suspicious father chased me on foot for a couple of city blocks. Now, it’s my turn to change the subject, if that’s OK. Recently I was showing a gallery curator my work and halfway through looking at my set of prints he stopped and asked how I had set up a particular photo. For the next few minutes I felt like a schoolboy in trouble with the principal as I sat there defending my work and explaining how a particular scene had occurred. My favourite street photos are the ones that invite this sort of questioning. They are absurd in their happenings and couldn’t really be set up. PAUL: Well, I guess there’s always been natural scepticism about images that seem ‘too good to be true’ or feature amazing occurrences, but that extraordinary stuff is often the staple of street and documentary photography. Now that so many people have a camera and access to photo-editing software, there is more scepticism. There have also been quite a few widely publicized cases where news photographs have been tampered with, which has added to doubts about the authority of images in general. I can’t keep up with the debate about whether Capa’s falling soldier picture is a ‘fake’ or not! I know when I initially saw Matt Stuart’s shot of the Trafalgar Square pigeon with all the human feet I did wonder if that was set up for an advert (well, the people anyway – it would be hard to direct a pigeon), so I was pleased to learn it was a straight candid shot.
FREDERIC: I know what you mean about being pleased to learn that a shot is candid, Paul, but I cannot say I feel disappointed if I find out that it is not. Instead I have to question the picture in another way. I have to question it more as a picture than in terms of the event it refers to. Should every picture be stamped ‘FAKE’ if it’s a digital
composition? Somehow I like this flirtation with reality in these pictures. Sometimes I like to be pushed as a viewer to find out how true a picture really is.
MARK: For me a photo definitely has a longer shelf life for enjoyment and examination if it is extracted from real life. The bizarre component is usually greater, and it allows us to re-examine lost customs, the way people dressed, the mundane details that stand out more as time passes.
NICK: That’s the crux of it to my mind. You’re out in a public place, lots of everyday stuff is going on, your finger is on the button and something comes out of the crowd, exists for a tiny moment and is gone. You have to recognize that it’s special and make your picture. That’s what I see in the best street photographs: evidence of the quickwitted mind of the photographer. FREDERIC: We used to take things for granted and first of all wonder how things could be so and so, but nowadays we have become very suspicious. The first thing we do is to check a photograph for ‘mistakes’ to gauge its probability. I do not recompose my pictures, adding or taking anything away. I see it as my job to identify a situation in which all the things happening in a particular place are greater and better than everything I could imagine. But at the same time I think that in the end there is just the picture and we should accept any photograph as valid whether it is digitally composed or naturally shot. The more important question is what we do with the pictures. Are we only looking for an affirmation of reality or do we want to use them to raise questions and sometimes even give answers. In this case a digitally manipulated picture may have the same veracity and power as a candid one. GUS: Like the rest of the choir here, I also do not do any major post-production or set things up to make a picture, but I feel very strongly that the act of putting four corners around something at a specific moment in time is already a manipulation of real life. We link things and create relationships that only exist because of our decisions. It’s just that we are choosing to work moment-to-moment and doing our cutting and pasting in camera. NICK: It’s interesting, Paul, Frederic and Jesse, that you all allude to the idea of pictures that are almost too crazy or unimaginable to be set up or created on a computer. Paul, you say ‘too good to be true’, Frederic mentions ‘greater and better than everything I could imagine’ and Jesse agrees that the best images ‘couldn't really be set up’. No picture that you compose on the computer is ever going to surprise and delight its creator like a crazy grabbed moment of street reality. A GLOBAL CONVERSATION 237