Ethics of street photography

Originally posted April 15, 2010

I photographed the street corners on Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard on September 1, 2006. I started at 110th Street and worked my way up the east side of the street, shooting the corners on the west side, and when I reached the top (155th Street), turned around and came back down the west side of the street, shooting the corners on the east side.

Towards the end of the day's shoot I was at 123rd Street, had just shot the southeast corner and was setting up to do the northeast corner when I was stopped by someone who objected to my taking pictures of people.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard & 123rd Street, Southeast Corner

He said it was disrespectful, that I should ask first, that he was speaking for some people across the street who didn't want to be photographed but didn't want to come over and confront me directly.

He said that what I was doing up in Harlem was something I wouldn't do in my own neighborhood — he was wrong about that, but that's neither here nor there — and I was taking pictures here, in Harlem, because as a white man I could get away with it.

He then told me a story — I have no reason to believe it wasn't true (but actually no reason to believe it is true, other than his own apparent sincerity) — about a couple of black kids going to prison for 5–10 years after their car hit a white child who had heedlessly run into the street and the police had believed the white people's version of what had happened.

And more — I just listened, though without backing down from my position that it was OK to take pictures of people in public without their consent — it is certainly legal, though some subsequent uses of such pictures, especially for commercial purposes, do require permissions from the people in them.

He suggested that I wouldn't believe the story about the black kids going to prison and I told him that I actually I did believe him, or at least had no reason not to.

He said that in any event what I was doing was wrong, and that I knew that it was wrong.

After he'd finished saying what he had to say, he went on his way, with a look of real disgust on his face, and I returned to setting up to take the northeast corner of the intersection, which I did, and then went on down to 122nd Street, and so on, back to 110th where I'd started from.

I think his objections are serious — they were on my mind when I started taking pictures on the streets, even before I started New York in Plain Sight, and they're still on my mind today. It comes down to a few questions:

1
Is it disrespectful per se, and therefore wrong, to take someone's picture without their permission?

2
Is it, moreover, racist for a white photographer in America to take pictures of black people without their permission?

3
Is it, by analogy, wrong for a housed photographer to take pictures of unhoused people without their permission, regardless of the race of either the photographer or the people being photographed?

There are surely more variations, but I think these cover enough of the ground to make the issues clear.

Of course these are not new questions, and not even all that specific to the practice of photography. Sociologists, ethnologists, anthropologists routinely confront similar questions. And there don't seem to be any firm answers.

Last year I was discussing this with an anthropologist friend of mine, Moshe Shokeid, and he showed me a book from 1940 by Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer — he was delighted to have just bought a first edition — that includes many photographs, including one of an unclothed chieftain. Moshe said to me that in 1940 it was possible to publish such a book but that he didn't think one could get away with it today.

Despite the near total acceptance of nude pictures in all sorts of publications over the past 70 years, it would be considered disrepectful, racist, imperialist, etc. if the the photograph of the unclothed Nuer chieftain were submitted for scholarly publication in 2010. And in many respects rightly so, perhaps, though the loss of the visual record that our improved sensibilities has brought with it would, no doubt, be a very real loss — and is this not also itself disrespectful, that we should not record and remember people as they are and were?

The sociologist Mitchell Duneier seems to have found a way through these questions in his marvelous book Sidewalk, with its compelling photographs by Ovie Carter, but I have no idea how I might apply Duneier's in-depth approach to the people of a single intersection to a project of the breadth — and, by comparison, depthlessness — of New York in Plain Sight. And as a photographer I am, alas, no Ovie Carter either.

I'm not clever enough to have any answers, myself. The issues, it seems to me, are real, and they are real because racism is real, homelessness is real, poverty is real, injustice is real. And as long as these realities cross our lives, we will — I hope — continue to be uncomfortable with them.

And not only in photography.

The northernmost corner

Originally posted April 14, 2010

Surely (?) everyone knows that Ninth Avenue crosses Broadway between West 64th and West 65th Streets, just across from Lincoln Center. Actually it's called Columbus Avenue above 59th Street, and has been since 1890, when it was renamed in anticipation of the coming 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of America.

No doubt — though I can't say I actually know — this was a developers move to add some class to an emerging neighborhood, just as later on part of the Lower East Side became the "East Village" and Hell's Kitchen became "Clinton."

I digress, but let me follow Sterne's example and add a digression upon the digression — and yet another one on top of that: you know his wonderful line in Tristram Shandy:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine …

but now backing up one step, the newly rechristened Columbus Avenue extended all the way up to 122nd Street, until the section above 110th Street was subsequently renamed Morningside Drive … and on the 1811 Commissioner's "grid" plan Ninth Avenue extended all the way up to 155th Street and later beyond that, including parts of what is now St. Nicholas Avenue and St. Nicholas Place (for more Ninth Avenue arcana, and much else as well, see the delightful Old Streets of New York).

Okay. Ninth/Columbus Avenue crosses Broadway between West 64th and West 65th Streets. But a surprising number of people — I was certainly one of them — don't know that Ninth Avenue resumes under its own name again at West 201st Street in Inwood,  and continues up to and just beyond West 208th Street, where since 1926 it has been interrupted by the MTA subway yards.

It then resumes again at West 215th Street, continuing up past West 220th Street, where it bends to the west and a block later, where West 221st Street would have been, tees into Broadway just below the Broadway or Harlem River Bridge —which actually crosses the Harlem Ship Canal (a better known bit of New York arcana) which orphaned Marble Hill from the Island of Manhattan when it was dug in 1895.

Broadway & Ninth Avenue at the Broadway Bridge, Northeast Corner

The IRT subway line — now the #1 train — use the upper deck of the Broadway Bridge, while traffic and pedestrians use the lower deck. The IRT tracks are elevated at this point, and indeed, the IRT from Dyckman Street, running north for about a mile, first along Nagle, then along Tenth Avenue, and then along Broadway, is the last surviving "El" in Manhattan.

The bridge itself has some history to it. The first bridge here, where the Harlem River and Spuyten Duyvil Creek met, was the "King's Bridge," built in 1693 — "KIng's" because it was a toll bridge except for soldiers and other agents of the King. In 1758 in act tantamount to rebellion, merchants and farmers in the area built a "Free Bridge," which was destroyed by the British in 1776 and rebuilt after the war.

The digging of the Ship Canal in 1895 occasioned the building of a new bridge, a single-deck swing bridge, which was subsequently replaced by a double-decker to accommodate the then new subway line. (The old single-deck deck bridge was reinstalled downstream as the University Heights Bridge). The present bridge, a lift design, dates from 1960. (For more on the Broadway Bridge and other New York City Bridges see the NYC DOT.)

The second, northern re-intersection of Ninth Avenue and Broadway is the northernmost intersection on the island of Manhattan, and the northeast corner the northernmost corner proper, though there is a nominal (and signed and gated) pair of corners on the west side of Broadway as well.

Why

Originally posted April 13, 2010

Last month, shortly after The Gotham Center for New York City History graciously posted a link to New York in Plain Sight, a visitor to gothamcenter.org responded with some kind words about the project and then went on to say

Now if you can only find a new site … one doing the same thing as this one, all four street corners … but in 1950-1960's New York including all boroughs … now that would be a find. — One can dream can't one….

And this is the simplest answer to the question I'm most often asked, namely "why"?

Ninth Avenue & 206th Street, Southwest Corner

As far as I know — and I would love to be wrong about this — such a site as the Gotham Center's respondent dreams of doesn't exist, nor, even, do the photographs, though I understand that the Library of Congress has been given a staggeringly huge collection, half a million photographs (not yet catalogued) of New York taken by one individual (I'm not sure I remember the name correctly, but I think it is Rizzo) over a period of thirty or more years and, if I remember rightly, including the 1940s and 1950s, so there is hope ….

There are more complicated answers to the "why" question, and I'll get to them sooner or later (sooner, most likely) on this blog, but there's another kind of simple answer, really the same answer as is implicit in what I just said, and that is that, e.g., the seafood diner on the southwest corner of Ninth Avenue and 206th Street disappeared a year or two ago — the last time I was up there it was a parking lot.

I never ate there, but everytime I saw it, or looked at the above picture of it, I was charmed to no end by the incongruity of its being in Manhattan, on the same small island off the coast North America as the Empire State Building and other New York City icons.

Maybe that's reason enough.

"In plain sight"

Originally posted April 12, 2010

Recently I was browsing in the photography section upstairs at The Strand and chanced upon a title that naturally caught my attention, believe it or not for two reasons: the title was In Plain Sight: The Photographs of Beaumont Newhall, and the second reason — the first, I trust, is obvious — is that I hadn't known (or possibly hadn't remembered) that this great historian of photography was himself a photographer. It's a lovely book, with a sweet preface by Newhall's friend Ansel Adams, and I bought it, along with another Newhall title: The Daguerreotype in America.

That's the trouble with buying a book like that, you end up buying two, or three, or….

One thing does lead to another, and by the end of an afternoon spent with both books I'd decided it was time to reread, carefully, Newhall's marvelous History of Photography, partly for the sheer pleasure of it and partly because for ages now I've been trying to figure out how to characterize what I was (and am) after in the photographs of my own In Plain Sight, and history, especially history as well done as Newhall does it, can be a good and stimulating source of ideas of all kinds.

Now what I mean by "what I was (and am) after" in New York in Plain Sight has two aspects, one having to do with the subject, the content if you will, of project; the other with formal and technical characteristics of the photographs themselves. (Yes, I know, it's a hoary distinction, form and content, but idea of overcoming it has by now gotten long in the tooth as well, so let's just use it for what it's worth and see where that takes us now that we "know better.")

The former aspect, the subject, the content, I've been content for quite a while to describe with the simple formula, "everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan," though despite this simplicity I do believe that there is a great depth to this subject (whether or not I've been able to capture it in the photographs).

The second aspect, however, the formal/technical aspect(s), has given me a lot more trouble, and this where I hoped to get some help from Newhall's History. And — surprise, surprise — I did, but first let me try to describe what I thought was after in the photographs, or at least part of what I was after, at the time I conceived the project, starting about five years ago.

What I wanted was to take pictures of the city that had nothing whatsoever to do with Photography with a capital "P" or with Art with a capital "A," photographs that excluded any and every trace of the reflexive and self-reflexive, the knowing, the ironic, the expressive; photographs that excluded, in short, the photographer from the photograph, but then also to do this in such a way as to not call attention to the absence of these qualities either. In short, to have the photographs be "about" nothing except their subject.

I should say at this point that my wanting this for the New York in Plain Sight photographs doesn't mean that I dislike or reject other people's photographs that do convey a consciousness of Photography and Art and their histories and current practices, that are reflexive and self-reflexive, knowing, ironic, expressive, subjective, or even that aggressively reject these qualities — I like, even love a whole range of possibilities, from Nan Goldin through Diane Arbus and from John Vachon through the Beckers and many, many others as well. But loving their work doesn't mean that I want to make photographers like theirs, or even not like theirs.

I used to joke with myself that what I was after were "high class snapshots" — what Atget might have done if he'd had a high-end digital camera and some contemporary lenses by Leica or Zeiss to work with instead of his 18 x 24 cm view camera and Rectilinear lens.

But then we would have missed Berenice Abbott's marvelously overwrought prose portraying Atget as a kind of Christ of photography, dragging his heavy camera and tripod cross-like through the narrow streets of Paris early in the morning to avoid the scorn and ridicule of the unwashed, all the while subsisting on nothing more than bread and milk for thirty years, etc., etc.

Well, not to say anything against Atget, or Berencie Abbot either — I love their work, both of them, I do — but for all the romanticizing of Atget's work, and for all that has been said about the virtues of the contemplative approach that the view camera enforces, I couldn't help wondering what Atget would have done if he'd had the option of using today's equipment, perhaps a Linhof technical camera with a Phase One 60 mega-pixel digital back and a Schneider or Rodenstock lens, mounted on a gyro-stabilizer mounted in turn on a lightweight carbon-fiber monopod — but now I've digressed into my own fantasy of how I'd like to reshoot New York in Plain Sight, maybe next year….

But back to the subject of this post: "New York in plain sight" was suggested to me by a wonderful photographer and writer, Benjamin Busch, who used this expression to describe the photographs in what I was then calling just "The Manhattan Street Corners." I'd already given a lot of thought to the idea of "the plain style" in photography — not to be confused with "straight photography" (more about this in another post) — and "in plain sight" seemed to capture the connection between the plain style I was searching for and the subject itself: "In plain sight" — plain to see, plainly seen (thanks, Ben).

And then this weekend, rereading Newhall's History, I discovered him describing the work of 19th century photographers like William Henry Jackson, Carleton E. Watkins, Francis Frith, and others as "topographical," that is, as concerned with "the literal, straightforward representation of the most characteristic aspects of places and things" as distinguished from an approach whose aim is "aesthetic … a means of personal expression." (Newhall, The History of Photography, p. 105)

And I thought, yes, that's it, that's what I'm about here — ein chadash tachat ha shemesh (there's nothing new under the sun) — perhaps, even if taking up Newhall's term puts me a little in mind of Monsieur Jourdain's delight in discovering that he'd been speaking prose all along.

But words can help, can be, if nothing else, a home for an idea, if only perhaps a foster home or even, in some circumstances, a place of refuge, somewhere to go to sort things out, all the while knowing that eventually you'll be leaving that place, that word, for somewhere — and something — else.

The ethical delegate

Originally posted April 11, 2010

Even after taking tens of thousands of pictures of people out on the streets of Manhattan, I'm still always a little nervous about it. Not so much afraid for my personal safety, though occasionally that too, but mostly, I suppose, a little nagging doubt about the ethics of street photography (more about which in another post, maybe this week). Still, living in the world, especially this one, you get used to making ethical compromises, and street photography at least has the legitimacy of a great tradition behind it.

In late May, 2006, I was working my way through what I think of as the "far" Lower East Side, near the East River. On the afternoon of the 31st, I was doing Cherry, Monroe, Madison, and Henry Streets. Earlier the day had been bright and sunny, but by the time I got to the corner of Rutgers & Madison, it had clouded over and the light was definitely on the dull side. I was tired and I was ready to pack it in for the day.

Perhaps with an older person's prejudices about the young, I had an intuition that there was going to be trouble with the group of kids — I resisted saying "gang" to myself, or tried to — on the southwest corner, but as was my usual strategy, I made a big enough show of what I was about to do — take the picture — to let them know that I knew that they might not want to be photographed and to give them time to turn their backs or get out of the way altogether if that's what they wanted to do.

Instead, they sent a delegate over to speak with me about this.

"What the fuck you doing, motherfucker," he said to me.

Expecting to encounter much more of this sort of thing than I actually ever did, I never went out with the camera without a pocket full of mini-brochures describing the project, what it was about, and so on. So I responded simply "Every street corner on the island of Manhattan — here, you can read all about it," and handed him one of the brochures.

He read it intently, seriously, then looked up at me. "No shit," he said, "wait here a minute," and returned to his friends across the street.

They huddled at some length, occasionally looking up to point at me. I stood there, somehow starting to enjoy myself and this situation, wondering how it was going to turn out.

After a few minutes, the delegate came back over to me, and asked "We want to know, mister, would you take our picture?"

"Sure," I said, "of course."

Back he went to join his friends. They posed and I took the picture. I hope they see it someday, if they haven't already.

Rutgers & Madison Street, Southwest Corner

(I rather prefer the unposed one that I sneaked in before they noticed me, but I feel I owe it to them to use the one they asked for.)

Thanks, guys.

Under a spreading chestnut tree . . . .

Originally posted April 10, 2010

Well, under a spreading honey locust tree, or three of them, anyway . . . but, alas, this lovely small town Fourth of July weekend scene (actually it was the 3rd of July, 2006, and in Manhattan to boot) …

Fulton & Gold (DeLury Plaza), looking southeast from Ann Street

no longer exists, as I was reminded today when I attempted to catch the C train to Brooklyn at the Fulton Street Station—

(it wasn't running at all, and the A train in the Brooklyn direction wasn't stopping at Fulton Street, so I ended up taking the 2 to Borough Hall and then walking to Jay Street to catch the A, which was making the C's local stops — ah, the pleasures of the New York subway system on the weekend … )

— In any event, I was there at Fulton and Gold early this afternoon and once again moved to regret that the trees are no longer there, having perished for the sake of the Fulton Street station renovation — or perhaps for some other reason? In any event, there they are in the photograph, in all their former glory, nearly four years ago.

As I am running around town both on ordinary errands and also photographing corners that I'd missed previously, I am continuously struck by how many corners have changed, and how much they've changed, in the very few years since I took most of the photographs that constitute New York in Plain Sight.

Old awnings down, new awnings up, old buildings gone, vacant lots in their place, or even new buildings up already, new shops in the old locations, the prior tenants scarcely even a memory already, this shop empty and for rent, that one being renovated, and the one over there is now a restaurant — I suppose that the nature of the changes varies with the economic climate, but I wonder if the rate of change isn't fairly constant no matter what the economy.

This is at least one of the reasons why I've begun to contemplate reshooting the whole island again next year, and I do hope that I'm able to arrange things so that I can do that.

The little park where the trees once stood is John J. DeLury, Senior Plaza, named for the founder and 40-year president of New York's Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association. Dating from 1985, the architect of the plaza was Bronson Binger, with landscape architects Christopher Kusske and Elizabeth Hand (from Norval White & Elliot Willensky's great AIA Guide to NYC, p. 44).

How many street corners are there on the island of Manhattan?

Originally posted April 10, 2010

With the recent run of good weather in New York I've been out with the camera taking care of the final clean-up of NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Manhattan Street Corners, that is to say, photographing the corners that I somehow missed during the main effort four years ago, as well as some where for security reasons I was prevented from taking the pictures but now, for whatever reason, am allowed to (or at least not prevented).

I hope to be done — done done done! — by the end of May, and this prospect promises at least a crude sort of answer to a question that has plagued me ever since I began this project, namely: how many street corners are there on the island of Manhattan?

When I began planning New York in Plain Sight now more than four years ago (!) naturally one of the first things I wanted to know was how many street corners there were on the island of Manhattan — a good thing to know if you're planning to photograph them all.

Naturally I assumed that this was a simple question, to be settled with at most a few tries with a search engine. I was wrong. Then I asked a friend who had spent his whole career in the New York City Planning Department — did he know? how I would I find out? who should I call?

He said that he didn't know the answer, didn't know how I might find out, and doubted that anybody else in city government knew either. I might learn how many traffic signals there are on the island . . . (I did find out, but I've forgotten).

So I thought, well, I'll just count them, or at least count enough of them to be able to estimate the total, which for my purpose at the time (determining whether the project was feasible), would be good enough.

I bought the big maps (scaled to 600 feet per inch) from the city planning department and set to work, but was soon enough daunted by the complexity — even in the Manhattan "grid" it's not as straightforward as you might think, owing to the number of "off-grid" intersections. So I guestimated, wildly, as it turned out, that the number was around 17,000 — difficult, but feasible.

Sometime in early July, 2006, with about 6,000 corners photographed and a sense of overwhelming fatigue setting in, I wanted to know more precisely how many were left — as if knowing that would somehow make it easier to keep going.

I learned from a report on the condition of Manhattan's streets that there are 3,360 intersections in the borough. Rounding down to 3,000 to roughly eliminate the off-island corners as well as the park roads, etc., and multiplying by 4 (which I knew would somewhat overestimate the total, as there are a good many three and even two-cornered intersections), I was pleased to discover the number was roughly 12,000, and not, as I'd first guestimated, 17,000, so that in fact I was half done instead of just a third or so of the way through.

12,000, it turns out, was not a bad estimate — certainly a lot better than 17,000! — but subsequently I realized that there was no precise answer to the question at all, that it depended on what you mean by "street" and what you mean by "corner" — and even then, judgment would be required, since some corners are only just barely "corners" — and where do you draw the line?

Since I was — and am — interested in street corners not as abstractions but as "live" sites where people's paths cross, I decided to exclude streets that are permanently closed to traffic, staircase streets, park roads, on/off ramps, medians, and traffic islands, and to more or less just wing it with the ambiguous cases, generally opting to be inclusive. And then I could always violate these strictures whenever it seemed worthwhile to do so. (I was, and am, more concerned not to exclude "real" corners than I am about including "questionable" corners.)

>By "real" corner what I mean, basically, is a corner formed at the intersection of two sidewalked streets that are generally open to every kind of vehicular traffic and that includes a lot large enough for at least one building (whether or not there is, at any given moment, actually a building on that lot).

Put differently, I'm mainly interested in the interplay of people, street (vehicular) traffic, and architecture, and so have arranged my inclusion criteria so that I get at least all of the corners where this interplay exists, or can exist.

My current answer to the question, "how many street corners are there on the island of Manhattan" is 11,485 — though I'm sure this number will be adjusted a little when I finish (soon, if this weather holds) taking care of the errors and omissions from the original shoots (mostly in 2006).

The crude answer, though, and the most reliable, will side-step the question altogether, and just be the number of photographs in the set — I'll post that number when I have it!