“STREETER”-THAN-THOU

Matinee Iol, August 2026

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I KNEW THAT IF I WERE TO LIFT MY CAMERA TO MY EYE, I’d lose her.

Everyone shooting on the street has received that look, that “don’t even try to take my picture” look. You size up a subject based on some kind of instinct, i.e., “oh, this one is telling a real story“, and you get into a mad rush to frame and snap before, well, before you get caught at it. And then comes the look.

I get it. Street photography, and whether it’s reportage or invasion, is a hotbed of controversy in the present day. What a paradox. We invite cameras into our private lives more than at any other time in history, posing for more candids and selfies than can ever be calculated. And yet. And yet we reserve the right to wall ourselves off from some, not all, but some, prying eyes. Hence you see the kind of solution I was forced into here, preventing myself from being detected by going for the dreaded from-the-hip shot, the ultimate “straight out of the camera” dice roll. All sugar or all sh—-…… well, the opposite of sugar, anyway.

And then there’s the whole discussion about whether I should leave the image, which is decidedly off-kilter, just the way it was shot, or if there’s some arbitrary rule of horizon-normalizing that dictate that I “straighten it out”, a decision accompanied by much soul-searching about “authenticity” and “realness”. Who is more “streeter”? Of such things are bar debates, and, occasionally, bar fights, fashioned. Here, for your consideration, is a “corrected” version of our young subject. Does this settle it? Can anything?

Does this strike you as more normal than the original? And stand up straight, willya?

At least Ansel Adams never had to wonder if he was violating the privacy of El Capitan by taking hours to get his exposure right. No complaints from fleeting sunsets that, “hey, I want to be alone”. And so it goes. Of course photography is an invasion, a theft. Every camera is a spy camera. Stealing a potato chip from your sweetie in the movies is still stealing. The issue comes down to who else in the society sanctions the snatching, of either chips or portraits. Life, at least as much as photography, is a negotiation.