[Leica] When in doubt ask photographer

[bd at bdcolenphoto.com (B. D. Colen)]

This thread has gotten more than a bit frayed, but -
Act like an elephant eating peanuts, and people will watch the circus.

But if you make act unobtrusively, you will succeed in photographing people
as they are, rather than as they want to be photographed. As Ted says, the
staff in an OR is too busy doing its jobs to waste time worrying about the
photographer; or as Tina points out, the subsistence level farmers in
Central America are too busy trying to survive to worry about the crazy
Gringo lady with the camera.

Obviously being a flower on the wall paper, or a pile of blankets in the
corner takes real work; it takes practice. But it can be done. To those of
you who insist that it can't, I would simply respond that you are unable to
do it, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Again, pick up a copy of
Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, by Eugene Richards, and then tell me that those
people were posing for Richards. For that matter, go look at my subway
photos, and tell me that most of the people in those photos were even aware
of my presence, much less posing.

Even when I have been hired to photograph a family, I find that after the
first 15-30 minutes I am largely ignored, or I am a part of the social
group, and am responded to as such, rather than as someone with a camera.
Next time you want to photograph a group of friends in a social situation,
try sitting still. Don't get up and move around for the best shot; pick the
one best spot and sit in it. Don't photograph for a while, and when everyone
has forgotten about you, start shooting. Don't keep raising the camera to
your face and lowering it, keep it up, between your upper chest and your
face. Move as little as possible. Shut up and shoot. You'll be amazed how
well it works.

And by the way, all of this is utterly unrelated to the question of "point
of view," which seemed to have someone gotten interwoven with all this. Of
course every photographer has a point of view. As I tell my students,
objectivity is a myth. Every time we go to photograph a scene we take to
that scene every belief, every experience, every prejudice we have
accumulated over our life times to that point. And all of that accumulated
experience has a major impact on how and what we shoot. But if we know what
we're doing, our subjects will not have the slightest idea of what our
prejudices and preconceived notions are, and they can't respond to what they
don't know.

B. D.