This is a funny thread because it's complaining about what is a visible sign of improvement of life for many, if not most people, around the world. Quality of life and access to information is better for most people now, than at any time in history; there will be arguments against this, of course.
As if we have a right or entitlement to photograph people in a state without their mobile devices. To some it just makes them work harder, and we've seen some good photos from it. If you don't like the posture, body language, facial expression, whatever, then move along.
Phil Forrest
I myself certainly wasn’t “complaining” about “access to information”. I’ve got an iphone, which I rarely have any good reason to access in public, and an Ipad, and two desktop computers. I’m obviously on them all the time, “accessing information”, which should be obvious, as much as I post on here at all hours of the day and night. So, that’s not what people are “complaining” about.
If someone took a photo of me, on a street corner, looking at a phone instead of engaging the world around me, the real world instead of the virtual one, it’s liable to be a photo not worth looking at, not in comparison to the work of others I mentioned earlier.
So, maybe it comes down to where one draws the dividing line between memorable photos and everyday dross. Maybe that’s where the disagreement stems from. If there are great photos, many of them, which revolve around people ignoring life around them while immersed in their devices, I have not seen them, not interesting ones, at any rate, ones that are worth a second look.
When public life was teeming with people more engaged with each other, in public, for good or ill, simply because they were in the here and now, there were more photographic opportunities to capture something interesting, and there was no need for one photographer to tell another photographer that he just needed to “move along.” It wasn’t the same scene over and over again, different people, different day, same basic scene. If I can put words in his mouth, I think that is what the OP was getting at. Everyone here is aware that there are still some people out on the street that don’t have a cell phone out, and it’s certainly possible to photograph them. Possibly even interesting as a photo, provided they are doing something more than just existing, on the street.
But, I’d enjoy seeing these interesting photos of people on a sidewalk looking at their phones, because I have never seen any. Please show.
I mean
interesting, like Kertész Gypsies interesting. And, if that isn’t the level we are aiming for when we get up every morning, why even do it?
Spending 15 minutes browsing through Winogrand’s NYC work should be enough to convince anyone but the most obstinate that, yes, he was an artist with talent, but there was more available to him at the time, easier pickings than there are now, when as now, many more people outside in public are engaged in exactly the same activity, an activity that is exclusionary of human interaction or outward, photographable emotion.
