Street shooting is visceral. Whether you are entering a foreign world or one with a lifespan of familiarities, your eyes must consume the setting with a desire to immortalise it, to preserve the buildings, the characters, the pavement, to establish them in history. It is something that, although ultimately spontaneous, still requires, like any photograph, a certain measure of thought, and of commitment.
To shoot from the hip is to err, to participate in an omission of thought. I don’t mean to say that the exploration of different angles and points of view, to extent the camera truly as a third eye to obtain a certain shot, is an omission of thought. Respectively, this demands much thought to create a photograph. The process of shooting from the hip however, more times than not, removes the element of constructive thought from the photograph.
In this practice, the photographer ultimately removes themselves from the scene. I think this is a grave mistake, and have touched on it recently from my post last week. For the photographer to escape the scene that they are attempting to capture, to attempt invisibility, they surrender any countenance they could have provided to the setting. They surrender the very support which is needed to complete the story which they are trying to depict.
The photographer must not be invisible, not be unseen. The photographer must enter the setting with strength and hunger, with ardor for the photograph they create, so it can develop a voice. It is the photographer which gives an image its identity, so if the photographer attempts to become unidentifiable, the photograph naturally follows suit.
I’m not including this necessarily as support for my argument, just stumbled across this earlier on youtube and wanted to share it.
Interviewer: “Can one learn to look?”
HCB: “Can one learn to have sex?”
Kool … Dude …