Friday, November 12, 2010

First Fridays

I took a group of Literature of Photography students to the galleries at 450 Harrison for First Fridays last week. We played with night photography and artificial lighting. I had fun with gels.




My adventurous side has slowed down as I hit the 8th month of pregnancy, and I really haven't had the ganas to carry my heavy camera around these days. But just you wait. Once this kid comes, I will be breaking the "no photos of kids" rule all over the place.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

An Open Letter to my Literature of Photography Students

Dear Literature of Photography students, 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 taking from them without offering anything in return. This photo has haunted me for four years, and while I feel 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 learned by doing what I will not do again. 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. Love, Alden