reasonable doubt

I did promise myself a post a day and, although my firstborn son arriving eight weeks premature has thrown me something of a curve ball, as I believe our transatlantic friends phrase it, I’ll try and keep up.

I managed to grab two things as I walked out the door at 2am to take my wife to the hospital; pregnancy notes and a camera. We had no idea that this was the beginnings of labour, but I did think, “Well, you never know.” I’m very glad I did. I’m happy to say I only turned the camera on once my child was actually out (although, I must confess, I’m talking the instant after he was born. I have a shot of the doctor flinging the newborn at my wife.) I am ecstatic to have a shot of him seconds after he entered the world, but it did get me thinking about appropriateness.

I have been shouted at just once as a photographer. I was testing a new lens by taking a photograph of a street artist. This, in itself, would not have been a problem, but for the fact that the artist was drawing a portrait of a young girl – her father suddenly realised that there was a photographer in the vicinity, and went, well, a bit mental. He calmed down when I pointed out that I was photographing the artist, not the girl, but it did teach me that the whole world does not share my wide-eyed innocence in these things. It still irritates me intensely how photographers have come to be perceived in public, by people and police alike, and I don’t want to go into a big spiel about freedoms here, but I have noticed, even in my short time behind a lens, a significant change in attitude.

This change is, in my opinion, directly due to the rise in popularity of the Digital SLR (Have we not got to the point where we can just call them SLRs? Surely new cameras sold in this category are overwhelmingly digital? Do we need to make an unweildy term even more so with the addition of an unnecessary “D”?). When my tool of choice was a little Nikon FE, no-one batted an eyelid. I remember one mother in Cambridge spotting my camera, and actually telling her little 5 year old daughter to pose with the balloon that she was so proud of so that I could take a shot. From where I stand now, that is essentially unthinkable, and it’s not a shot I’d today dare attempt.

This saddens me. It appears we lost some of our wonder, and gained a great deal of unwarranted cynicism. Our default position is not that the motives of a stranger are pure, but sinister. No-one stops to really think what genuine physical harm could become of a rogue photograph of their child; I hate to say it, but truly sinister intent with regards to images of children can be much more readily fulfilled nowadays than going through the rigmarole of stalking the streets, garnering furtive thrills from photographing children doing exciting things like taking the tram through Croydon.

There appears to be a strange assumption that if you are a pervert/terrorist, you would pick the most ostentatious tool possible to get the job done – I suppose because you’d want the highest possible image quality for your nefarious purposes? Having said that, I suspect there’s not a lot of thinking been done at all. The objections of the masses are based on gut reaction, I would suggest, and reasoning doesn’t really play it’s part. If I were a terrorist, I think a high quality cameraphone would be my best tool. That, or Google Streetview.

My guess is that it is this change in attitudes that is one of the things fuelling the movement towards the use of retro cameras. If I take my Yashica TLR out, I get precisely the opposite reaction. People actually stop in order to start a conversation. They’re interested in it as an object, and fascinated as to why I would use such a thing. Rangefinders, which I’ve had a bit of a thing for over the last year, engender a different reaction again; no reaction whatsoever. I can see why street photographers use them. The e-p1, amongst its various attributes, carries two which are surprisingly useful. It looks like a much older, film camera, and it’s really quite beautiful. These qualities are often discussed in terms of the buyer’s fetish, and not really a serious consideration when discussing the camera’s usefulness as a tool, but in reality they’re useful in their own right. They mean that it either doesn’t attract attention, or it attracts the right kind of attention.

All in all, it shrinks the boundary of “things that are inappropriate to photograph,” because this is a quality not inherent in the situation itself, but rather the perception of those being photographed. Both an interesting and practical distinction.