It is axiomatic that you can't both observe and participate in something simultaneously. Take the archetypal tourist, on vacation with his Nikon and video camera in hand. As he sweeps the scenery with his eye on the video display, is he experiencing the Eiffel Tower, or is he just experiencing his pictures of the Eiffel Tower? When he gets home, his videos will be "just like the real thing" because his experience of the real thing was seen through a viewfinder.

It's not so bad to be an observer at your own vacation, especially if that's what you enjoy (and you will have nice pictures to look at later!), but what about that poor soul, the amateur/pro artistic photographer, the one who takes his camera with him everywhere and "captures the spirit of throbbing city life" and the like. These guys are cool, right? They're always at the right place at the right time, getting pictures of cutting edge musicians and artists, candid shots of the beautiful people at play, or who knows what else. But you know, while he's observing all this exciting life, he's not living it.

I'm one of these characters, the art photographer who has reams of photos of his exciting life -- club action, bartenders, famous djs, beautiful people, dancing, drinking, parties, street life, gatherings, crowds, friends, excitement. But if you look closely at those photos you'll notice something obvious but striking: I'm not in any of them. Naturally, I was behind the camera watching the action while everyone else was creating it. Oh, I'm not totally absent from my own life, but even when I'm not taking a picture I'm keeping my eye open. If I really want to just enjoy something, I do better to leave the camera at home -- but there will often come a moment when I wish I had it with me, like a security blanket. It's not just that you step back and observe in order to feed your photography, but also that the photography gives you an excuse to step back and observe. It's a badge that gives you permission to be a voyeur. And sometimes it's easier to step back and watch than to step up and take the risk of participating.

The danger, of course, is that you'll stop participating in your life entirely, in favor of turning it into art. It's a temptation because it's easy and, if you do it well, you'll get praised for how well you do it. The more invisible you can become, the better a photographer you will be. To a point. Because art without underlying emotion, expression, mood, or meaning becomes boring, no matter how pleasing its aesthetics or how cool its content. And if you become the perfect observer, detached and invisible, you'll forget what it means to be human, and your observations will be cool and perfect and utterly uninteresting.

I've often thought that there are three levels of perception and expression in photography, particularly portrait photography (which can include any photos of people). From the easiest to the hardest to capture, they are: the third person, the second person, and the first person. The third person ("he/she/it") is about how the subject looks, his or her objective appearance. The second person ("you") reveals something about the subject's nature or interior life. The first person reveals the photographer's own feelings about the subject. I believe that truly interesting portraits must work on all three levels. Remember that though the viewer of a photograph may identify with the subject, she is in the position of the photographer. Without any identification with the "first person", the viewer is left with a distance between her and what she is looking at.

How does this relate to detachment and voyeurism? If the photographer is detached from his subjects, he may not know them well enough to discover the second person (though it is often possible to learn something about what's below the surface through observation). Furthermore, the detached photographer will never find the first person, because he is too removed from his subject to have any feelings about it at all. Therefore I think that if a photographer is going to shoot people, he must remain connected with them and resist the temptation to become a perfect observer. I imagine -- and this could be pure projection, though I have anecdotal evidence -- that many people who are drawn to photography are natural observers. And so they -- we -- must fight the temptation of our nature to melt into the shadows and watch the action, keeping one foot in life and one foot in voyeurism, camera at the ready but not always blocking the view.

02/21/2002