In Paris, I picked up a camera. The city made it easy. There were groups, there were streets made for wandering, there were a hundred reasons to point a lens at something beautiful or strange. After Paris, life got in the way. The UK came and went. The camera stayed but the outings did not.
I have become more reserved over the years. Not just with people. With cameras too. Street photography is an intimate act. You are capturing someone’s life without asking. The privacy of strangers weighs on me in a way it did not when I was younger and less aware of such things.
In Phoenix there is a group that does this. The timings never work for me. So one evening I decided to go alone. Just me and the camera in downtown Phoenix during golden hour.
The first few minutes were uncomfortable. That particular apprehension of standing on a street with a camera, wondering if you have any right to be there. And then I started shooting. And I forgot everything else.
Two things happened that I did not expect.
The first was a man pulling a collapsible wagon across the road. I spotted him from a distance and waited, the way street photographers do, for him to enter the frame just right. I looked through the viewfinder. Nothing. I looked up. He was walking directly towards me.
“What did you shoot?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was planning to take your picture but you walked towards me.”
He laughed. We both did.
The second was during golden hour. A person walking into the light, the kind of silhouette that makes you hold your breath. I was about to press the shutter when someone appeared at my elbow and showed me his phone screen. He had taken the same shot. We stood there comparing what we each saw in the same light. Smiles. A brief conversation. Two strangers on a street with cameras and nothing else in common.
The passersby smiled too. Encouraging, unhurried smiles.
I went out worried about intruding on people’s lives. I came back having connected with them instead.
I should not have stopped doing street photography.