Shoot the Homeless!

[Goodyear]

I think photographing homeless people is immoral

a)better sell your fancy camera and buy them a hot meal

Interesting. I've pondered this many times, and often been consumed with middle-class guilt over it.

(By the by, I deliberately don't photograph people living on the street, because to me it feels like I am deriving the pleasure I get from making an image from their miusfortune. This would be different were I making the image for some purpose other than my own recreation.)

But to return to Michael's observation...

My wife and I support a variety of charities, mostly those working against poverty issues. Some we support practically, some financially, some by making different decisions as to what groceries we buy and where. I say this not to say "Oh look, aren't we good", but rather to provide context.

She and I both enjoy photography greatly. When we go out shooting together, depending on where and what we are trying to photograph, we can be carrying along equipment that represents a frightening financial investment (not in the sense of expecting financial return - you know what I mean).

Or if we go out somewhere, we're travelling in a car that costs us several hundred pounds a month in repayments, fuel, insurance, maintenance and so on.

Or if we get a few days off together, it's a rare enough occurrence that we won't think too long at all about spending a similar several hundred pounds on a nice hotel, nice food, nice entertainment, travel, etc.

These and other characteristics of our lifestyle I find incredibly and increasingly difficult to reconcile with our ideals. Does our really quite comfortable activism cancel out a lifestyle that is unavoidably decadent when measured by global standards? Or is it just hypocrisy?

I am quite often tempted to photograph people sitting begging in Edinburgh. There's a Starbucks on one of the really upmarket shopping streets in town, and there's always someone begging outside. That would make a powerful and provocative image that could be relevant to all kinds of observations from local capitalist culture to global corporate culture. But it's all these thoughts, that make me shuffle my feet and mumble, that stay my hand. I think I'm concerned and respectful and idealistic, but I wonder am I just telling myself that to make me feel better.

I wouldn't be prepared to make such a blanket statement as "photographing homeless people is immoral". But I'm pretty sure that for me, if I was just out shooting for a Saturday morning, then it would be... not quite right, at least.

I'm sorry if this has strayed just a little bit OT. Or even OTT. I don't know.

But to me it's all relevant, because it's a large chunk of what informs my thoughts on the subject.

 

[ClaremontPhoto]

thats practicly prostitution of the bad kind - you use a persons condition so you can buy him cheaply and produce a strong photot- best bang for a buck sort of speak.

Not at all.

Even if I don't take a photo I will always give a sandwich or a bag of apples to somebody needy.

 

[Michael I.]

thats generally nice of you but what I meant i think you cant "buy"the right to photograph a person in distress

 

[Michael I.]

it's ok to photograph homeless people if they are your friends.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national...-to-his-subject/2006/03/06/1141493609780.html

 

[peterc]

most of the homeless in Toronto are not all "crazy" or "addicted"

I've talked to most of the 20 or so homeless who frequent the area where I work downtown. They range from the solvent addicted (there's one guy I figure has about 6 months before his brain is complete mush ... he can't be conversed with now) to those who are there by choice (one guy told me he worked and lived outside for years in the north and couldn't live inside when he moved to the city ... he uses the shelters on bad nights but prefers to stay outside).
In between there are the crack addicts, alcoholics, criminals (several told me they can't rent a place because of their record), and the insane.
I haven't taken pictures of them for a couple of reasons: I haven't really had any reason to, and people aren't my forte.
Some of them probably wouldn't object, others might be inclined to give you a "tune-up", and many just (sadly) wouldn't notice.

Peter

 

[RJBender]

I think photographing homeless people is immoral

a)better sell your fancy camera and buy them a hot meal

b)it's easy to get a good response out of a strong subjected photo - it doesnt have to be good(watch time magazine-they do it constantly)it's cheap.

It's justifiable if it illustrates a project to raise money or awareness- I once shot a friends brother funeral - he was killed in a military activity(Israel)at age twenty. I have very strong images of his grandafthe(a jewish WWII veteran)crying-probably the best image I ever took - newer showed it to people - I actually feel ashamed of it.

respectfully,my 2 cents

If there's a good story that accompanies the photo, I don't see it as a cheap shot.

R.J.

 

[RJBender]

I think photographing homeless people is immoral

a)better sell your fancy camera and buy them a hot meal

b)it's easy to get a good response out of a strong subjected photo - it doesnt have to be good(watch time magazine-they do it constantly)it's cheap.

It's justifiable if it illustrates a project to raise money or awareness- I once shot a friends brother funeral - he was killed in a military activity(Israel)at age twenty. I have very strong images of his grandafthe(a jewish WWII veteran)crying-probably the best image I ever took - newer showed it to people - I actually feel ashamed of it.
respectfully,my 2 cents

What's wrong with depicting strong emotions in a photograph? Is it wise to pretend that these emotions don't exist?

Check out this photograph by Ed Clark:
http://pictopia.com/perl/gal?galler...227&ptp_photo_id=syn:life:121229&sequencenum=

It was the spring of 1945 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the country's only four-term president, who led a shattered American people through the Depression and most of the Second World War, had just died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Ed Clark drove all night from Nashville to Warm Springs, Georgia to cover the news. He arrived to a swarm of photographers, all trying to get the best view of the hearse carrying Roosevelt's coffin. It was then that Clark heard one of Roosevelt's favorite hymns Goin'Home being played on an accordion. With his Leica camera in hand, he snapped a few frames of Navy bandsman Gordon Jackson with tears streaming down his face as he played. Apparently, no one else had seen what Clark had seen, and Clark's dramatic photograph became the symbol of a nation in grief. This photo took up an entire page in the next issue of LIFE.

source: http://www.photocollect.com/bio.php?id=165

“If a photograph can arrest you for a moment, then you’ve really got something.” -Ed Clark

More information here:
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue9902/clark01.htm
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue9902/clark02.htm

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Clark when he gave a presentation at the St. Louis Camera Club several years ago.

R.J.

 

[RJBender]

Without looking at it from a moral perspective, but solely from a photographic one, shooting the homeless is simply not challenging. It's been done before many, many times.
I interpret "the commandment" as a suggestion to find a new subject also worthy of exploration.

Where are those "commandments"? I read them once but didn't bookmark the site.

R.J.

 

[BrianShaw]

Ia)better sell your fancy camera and buy them a hot meal

You first... I'm a Republican.

 

[BrianShaw]

Where are those "commandments"? I read them once but didn't bookmark the site.

It must have been on the "third tablet"... the one that got dropped.

 

[RML]

I want to warn everyone upfront that mine is a very obscure and old-fashioned point of view. It is:

In a documentary sense, you acquire the right to photograph something by making an effort to know it, be part of it, and understand it. Once you're involved in the subject, then you can make pictures (or not) as part of your involvement. If you're ONLY interested for the purpose of making pictures, you're a shallow exploiter. (And you'll probably make superficial, crappy pictures.)

I don't find this a very obscure PoV at all! If I read Salgado's work and "bio" well than this is exactly his modus operandi: he gets involved and uses his photography to further the cause. I, personally, find such an approach extremely difficult but for me it's the approach that I (try to) use in my shooting of Mongolia. I have a few projects running, covering several aspects of Mongolian urban life, and I can only get so far with an inpersonal approach. If I want to record the lives and times, I'll have to dive in, become part of it and actually experience and understand what I'm involved with.

"Shooting the homeless" is just one possible theme/topic but the involved way of shooting is probably the preferred way of shooting many-if-not-all in-depth documentaries.

I'm rambling, I know. 🙂

 

[RayPA]

Where are those "commandments"? I read them once but didn't bookmark the site.

R.J.

RJ I saw them too. They were in a RFF member's signature. I think it was the Philadelphia Leica User Group (PLUG)—google it maybe?

🙂

 

[RayPA]

Here ya go!

by this groups commandments, about all you should do with your camera is look at it. 🙂
🙂


🙂

 

[RJBender]

RJ I saw them too. They were in a RFF member's signature. I think it was the Philadelphia Leica User Group (PLUG)—google it maybe?

🙂

Thanks, Ray.


The user is Kyle Cassidy
The commandments are on the Annenberg School for Communication's website
Is Kyle a RFF member?

R.J.

 

[John Camp]

When I was working (for a couple of decades) as a reporter, I did several long take-outs on street people, including a guy who froze to death in a cave on a 20-degree-below-zero night. My ultimate, final, unhappy conclusion is that the problem cannot be solved at this time. And I am what would be conventionally called a liberal.

If anybody gets Lenswork magazine, Bill Jay has a series of street-guy photos in the latest issue that are pretty interesting. Not because they are street guys, but because street guys have interesting faces.

Which reflects a different impulse than the one that sends some dimwit into the street looking for street people because he needs a worst-case A- in a photography course to get into the MFA program.

JC

 

[rover]

Good point about Lenswork. The series is a very strong one of portraits.

 

[Sparrow]

All the previous

grant me the Serenity to accept the things I can not change, The Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the differance
take the pic hope for the best?

regards

 

[Memnon]

Thank god we don't have to many homeless people here to shoot !!!

The ones which are, are that by choice, not by lack of proper government.

Now just the title of this thread "Shoot the homeless" says enough about the originator, whatever he/she tried to achive by placing this thread..... And I'm sure lots of forumists will cover this up with the usual blabla and BS and more BlaBla and more BS ...

What remains is the fact that starting a thread with "Shoot the Homeless" is pretty sick in my point of view.... no political statement here, just a humanitarian touch !

 

[RJBender]

Thank god we don't have to many homeless people here to shoot !!!

The ones which are, are that by choice, not by lack of proper government.

Now just the title of this thread "Shoot the homeless" says enough about the originator, whatever he/she tried to achive by placing this thread..... And I'm sure lots of forumists will cover this up with the usual blabla and BS and more BlaBla and more BS ...

What remains is the fact that starting a thread with "Shoot the Homeless" is pretty sick in my point of view.... no political statement here, just a humanitarian touch !

Where are you located?
This thread will get more views than a thread entitled "Photograph the homeless"

R.J.

 

[Fedzilla_Bob]

What remains is the fact that starting a threadwith"Shoot the Homeless" is pretty sick in my point of view....nopolitical statement here, just a humanitarian touch !

I don't think that the originator of this thread was offering the title as advice.

It may well have been written to provoke interest. Which it has.

The discussion taking place in this thread is, as a result,politicaland social. lately this would have degenerated into insults annamecalling. But the participants have been pretty level headed thistimeout. Which is great.

It's a decent thread built on a sensitive question or concern.

I think most understood the bit of tonque and (considerable) cheekinthe title George created. Apparently the dark humor in it caught alotof eyes.

It's too easy to look away from society's problems. I finditinteresting that in spite participant's differing views, there isabaseline concern for people who are less fortunate.

Bob H