How to See

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     Street photography is a difficult art form. Not only is it a type of photography that encompasses a multitude of subjects, but it is also a form that is vulnerable to the influence of many outside factors. As a result, it is always a new experience even if the photographer has been shooting street photography for years. However, the result is always extraordinary because there is a sense of intimacy with the subject that arises from the photographer’s need to overcome the many obstacles that exist in the process of shooting street photography.

     I have not been shooting street photography for years, but I do have some experience with it. As a required part of the Stuyvesant High School curriculum, I had to take a technical class and since I had always been interested in photography, I decided to take the black and white photography course. I learned how to photograph everything from landscapes to portraits and since Stuyvesant was located in New York City, the streets became the subjects of the various photography projects. It was an amazing experience because not only did I get to explore the streets of New York City, but I also learned to look at the world in a different way – through a different lens.

     This past experience, however, was burdensome in terms of this new street photography project. In my previous class, my camera was a Pentax K1000 – a black and white film, SLR camera. For this project, I used a Kodak CX6230 – a color, automatic camera. My biggest frustration in using this new camera was that I could not control the focus or exposure. I could not achieve any special effects that are possible due to the control that an SLR camera gives its user over the focus and exposure. Furthermore, there were times when the exposure automatically chosen by the Kodak camera was just plain wrong and I could not do anything to change it except to try to move to a new location where the lighting would be different.

     Working in color rather than in black and white was also a new experience. I finally understood why photographers often choose one over the other. Black and white photography allows the photographer to perfect the basic elements such as composition, focus, and subject matter. Adding color to a photograph means adding a whole new aspect to the image. It makes the image more complex and interesting, but it also becomes another element that the photographer must consider and control. Working with black and white film, I became focused on controlling things like composition and the point of view in a photograph. As a result, I was thrown off balance when the element of color was suddenly added to the process. When I first started shooting photographs for this project, I got some images that had great composition and focus, but they looked dull. I realized that the problem was that I had not been considering color and once that aspect of a photograph gained importance in my mind, my shots were more successful.

     In addition, practicing straight photography made me more careful as a photographer during this project. Due to the fact that my previous class involved working with film, a large portion of the instruction was focused on manipulation in the development process. However, for this project I had no darkroom – not even Photoshop. Therefore, there was no way that I could manipulate my image after I had shot it. The only part of using the Kodak camera that did not lead me to become frustrated was that it was digital camera and allowed me to immediately see what image I had captured. Therefore, if I did not like what I saw, I could simply try again. In film photography, this is not possible. All you can do is carefully plan the shot and then hope that the image comes out as well as you think it should have.

     The other factor that presented a substantial challenge for me was the weather. Most of the time it was raining and therefore, it was impossible to photograph anything. Then, half the time that it was not raining, it was overcast. In black and white photography, this would not have been as much of a problem because the image would have just come out a little grayer than it normally would. However, in color photography, shooting on a cloudy day was a complication because the gray, which was insignificant in black and white photography, made the images bland in color photography.

     Even though there were many obstacles that I had to overcome as a photographer, I am pleased by my end product. The theme of my photographs was not a particular cultural encounter, but rather a guide on how people should look at the world in order to find them. Each image is an example of a different lens that a person could look through to find the cultural encounters that exist all around them. So, my photographs do not have titles because the focus of each image is not the subject, but the point of view from which the subject is seen. I chose various static objects for the “subjects” of my photographs because they allowed me to take the time to find the particular point of view that I wanted to portray.

     Sight became my subject for this project because it is the first thing that I think of when the word photography is mentioned. Not only the process of looking through a viewfinder or looking at a photograph, but also looking at the world and seeing the moments and images that deserve to be eternally preserved in a photograph. When I first learned the art of photography, I learned to look at the world in a different way. I learned to look for the tiniest details as well as the expansive views. This gift of sight that photography has given me is what inspired me to try and show other people how to see through my photographs.