As I mentioned in my last post, it takes the time to get access to your subject; however, sometimes there’s no time to think before you capture a moment, an iconic moment, and that is what street photographers do every day. This documentary from 2013, “Everybody Street”, reveals the lives and work of iconic New York street photographers, including Magnum photographers Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt and Bruce Gilden.
Taking photos on the street is unpredictable and challenging, a moment may be gone if you make your decision a second later, you might return with no good pictures, or even put yourself in danger. In this trailer, at 00″57, Bruce Gilden got yelled and pushed by a lady as he’s taking a photo of her. As Gilden is known for photographing extremely close to his subject, with flash, which usually weirds people out, but it doesn’t stop him from getting closer and closer.
This documentary features interviews with 13 photographers and two historians, as they explain how they get to go out and get their work done, how they feel about their “job” and what motives them to continue doing it. What inspires me in this documentary is when Boogie talks about his experience of photographing gangsters and drug addicts, “For me, it’s becoming what you’re shooting, you have to get into their heads… …Some lines shouldn’t be crossed, what are those lines? The deeper you go, the better pictures you’ll take.” This has always been a struggle for me when I’m at the point to decide whether I should go further to get hopefully more out of the subject, but spend more time and might put myself in danger, or be satisfied with the legitimate shots, and I have never chosen the latter.
“It’s not the street; it’s the life on the street or where the street takes you.”
“It was beauty and beast, but sometimes beast were beautiful.”
Same as taking photos, what we see and learned from those 13 photographers can also apply to video making, the deeper you go, the better story you will get. Making a good documentary work is time-consuming, which means 1-hour shooting doesn’t equal to 1 hour of usable footage. Those photos we see in the “Everybody Street” are only one or two out of thousands of everything they photographed that day; they’re not there at the exact moment when the perfect moment happened. Same with video, the more you shoot, the more choices you will have later for editing, there is never enough, or too much footage. Sometimes when we find a perfect background for a shot, we will just have to wait for someone to come in. Always be bold to interact with strangers, if you don’t feel and make it looks weird, they won’t feel it’s strange that you’re pointing the camera at them, and small talks usually help to get people open up.
Besides the “Everybody Street”, another two examples I’d like to add along with this post are the “City of God” (a 2002 fiction movie), and Eric Kim’s blog. The City of God is about the journey of a young photojournalist of how he got his first camera from his gangster friend, to become a successful photojournalist. And Eric’s blog is a fantastic source to acquire knowledge of anything about photography, techniques, equipment reviews, and recommendations, encouraging notes from other great photographers, etc.