An Open Letter to my Literature of Photography Students

Dear Literature of Photography students,

I know you are spying on my blog.

Therefore, I have decided to take on a couple of the assignments I've given you lately and write you a letter about street photography. I have this one photo that I think about a lot in this context. I took it while I was in Cambodia, where I dealt with the awkwardness of taking pictures of strangers in a way I'd never done before. I'd always been more of a "sneaker," and was shy about approaching people and asking to take their picture, especially when I was clearly a newcomer to the culture, and didn't speak a word of Khmer.

I had mixed results with that approach this time.

So, here's the photo. I took it at the Ta Prohm temple in Siem Reap province.



I took this photo with my Nikon 18-200 lens on full zoom. Then I cropped it. This means I was over 200 feet away from this group of performers...but they saw my massive lens and they saw me pointing it at them. And they were - or at least the girl in the middle was - not pleased.

They were performers who danced or posed on demand for money. But I was not offering them money. Though I was trying to capture a "between the shots" scene like the kind Annie Liebovitz described in her series of shots of Nixon leaving the White House, what I'm assuming they saw was me stealing from them. This photo has haunted me for four years, and while I feel some guilt when I look at it, I also feel glad that I took it. I'm glad that I caught myself getting caught as the tourist who took without asking. Because, when we are tourists, we are always, at some point, that kind of tourist.

I also took some "street photography" shots that were happy stories. In this case, I saw this family and wanted to take their picture. When I asked, they were delighted. I took hundreds of shots of this little ham here.



I also "snuck" a picture of these monks, who then followed me and wanted to see the photos. We wound up spending almost an hour trying to talk to each other.





And just as fast as something like that would happen, I'd make a bad decision to follow a few naked kids and take pictures of them when they clearly didn't want their picture taken.



As my friend Patrick said of photographic subject matter, "Naked children is generally a bad idea." But we could argue that one for a while.

So there you have it. Street photography in Cambodia. You, too, could go on Semester at Sea and see it all for yourselves! It's been four years, and obviously I can't stop thinking about it.

Love, Alden