Street Shooting in Vancouver: The Importance of Waiting

Yesterday was my first chance, in far to long, to get out into the streets and shoot.  Street shooting is something that I have loved since my first year of art school when I became obsessed with the beautiful photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Jonas Bendikson and other Magnum greats.  During that year I made sure to always have my camera strapped to my wrist as if it were replacing my hand.  I shot thousands of images a week while out on the streets that year and those following while still in school.  Street shooting became a secondary form of breathing to me.

Since finishing school and working however, I get so wrapped up in planning, branding and whatnot, that I rarely get out to shoot in the streets anymore.  That, along with the fact that I currently live in Vancouver, and during the winter here I have seldom opportunity to do so.  This is painful for me on a number of different levels, the first one selfishly, which I stated above, but the most detrimental is that I loose touch with many people in the larger community.

Yesterday, when I finally shut the lid of my tyrant of a laptop and headed out to Vancouver’s Chinatown and Downtown East-side neighbourhoods, I thought to myself about the last few times I had been out shooting in these areas and how I had become unnaturally introverted.  I find this to be very debilitating because, as John Macpherson said in his post on Duckrabbit the other day;

“Photographers often say to their subjects “just ignore me, pretend I’m not here” in order to try to gain some ‘intimate’ fly-on-the-wall photographic opportunities. I’ve always hated that. In reality what they should say is “please accept me” – a somewhat different concept and for me a much more humane one; one that brings with it the need for interaction, and mutual respect…”

I’ve always hated the idea of being a ‘fly on the wall’ while shooting, but after I read that post I realised that I have been doing that inadvertently while recently shooting.  So yesterday I made a conscious effort to shed that terrible habit I had developed my last few times out.

Then I met Sook, who had called out to me from across the street.  He must have mistook me for a lost tourist and started pointing out a bunch of landmarks and buildings in the area that he though would make great photographs, and instead of just politely shaking him of and continuing to walk (which is an extremely distasteful ‘Vancouver’ habit I’ve acquired since living here) I listened to what he had to say.  After he stopped I asked if I could photograph him, and after shouting ‘sure!’ excitedly he jumped back from me about four feet and stood at the sidewalk’s corner.

But if I had, like the last few times before, went out shooting and fell into an introvert’s daze, I would never have had the chance to make this portrait or met Sook, and been amazed at all the strange facts of Vancouver architecture that he knew so well.

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