Thank you for some thoughtful comments.
I would like to get the exploitation issue out of the way. As Airfrogus pointed out, nearly all photography of people can be construed as exploitative. When I put pictures of my friends on the RFF gallery, I can be accused of exploiting my friends for a little applause from fellow photographers. Sometimes, exploitation is built in. Leibowitz shot Gorbachev for Vuitton. Everything about that photo is exploitative. And when I used to shoot naked dead chickens for supermarket chains, that was exploitation at a whole 'nother level.
And when I shoot the view from my front door, I take what is free, and make it mine, and exploit it. So maybe exploitation is a moot point, or at the very least, it needs to be qualified.
Jumping on the word 'exploitative' to dismiss photos of homeless people is sad. It shows a mindset that automatically imputes nefarious ulterior motives to the photographer. Something close to the several people who approached me with a suspicious frown, and the question : 'Why are you taking photos?' How dirty must ones mind be, when all one can think of when seeing a photographer, is that he must be some kind of pervert?
Ok, I've got it easy. I'm not doing it for money. I can blithely walk around and collect nuggets of beauty in a topsy-turvy world. Exploitation, as applying to photography, does not even come into the equation for me. But I do think the exploited deserve a fair shot, and that is not a pun. Giving a beggar a decent portrait is, to my mind, just the contrary of exploitative, even if he never gets to see the picture.
Of course, exploitative photography does exist. But there is much more of it in advertising than in candid (street) photography. Mebbe we should all be dumping guilt on advertising photographers, instead of those who shoot street people.
Lets just have the politesse, to assume that we do not necessarily have dirty motives. It would be easy, from my lofty standpoint as a photographer who shoots for free, to disdain all those money-grubbing jobbers, accuse them of the vilest crimes against ethics. I don't. Children have to be fed and educated, bills have to be paid. Earning your money with a camera is one of the most interesting ways to do it, and people like Avedon and Irving Penn showed that advertising does not exclude excellence.
Like that old ABBA song, something gooey and sirupy, that pops up in my brain from time to time, I have a sweet spot for that terribly kitschy portrait of a gypsy boy with a tear on his cheek, that almost everybody seemed to have in the 60ties and 70ties. I'd love to do my own version of it, one day. Some of them had a 'real' tear, made from varnish. Now that was an exploitative photograph. Selling misery to the masses. Yuk.
Cheers.
Oh, and thanks everyone for liking my pictures.
