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The sideways-glance with telephone and water bottle is my favourite. What a moment caught!
I’m glad you liked it. I have hesitant in the past to take candids like this, but someone recently made me look at it differently. Your comment reinforces that. Thank you.
What changed? How are you able to now and weren’t before? I can’t do it.
I thought I was being cruel somehow to pin people on candid moments. The advice was to just be true to what I see and let the rest take care of itself.
I wouldn’t have said cruel exactly. But I suppose I’m afraid of being intrusive and in effect, discourteous. But the irony is that I’d have no compunction in sketching them, while taking a photograph feels like something I can’t do. I’m still divided!
Photographs are meant to be shown in a way that sketches are not – maybe that’s it. If someone were to come over to one of my sketches (it would be terrible, but let’s ignore that) and was offended, I would be upset to have upset them.
So would I. Horrified actually. It’s never happened (yet). I’d make the excuse that it was my lack of technical skill – but that’s not strictly true because what you think, your gut response really, does come across in a drawing in a way a photo doesn’t necessarily show. I’d be afraid, with a photo, that people would recognise something of themselves they didn’t want to see and think others would see this and take it to be literally true because it was a photograph. (This sounds muddled. Sorry).
Yes, there’s more wiggle room with a sketch. And people do feel pinned to the wall with photos. It’s a big subject – protecting the physical appearance and protecting how the personality is projected.
All your people photos are lovely, David. Do you ask them permission afterwards? I don’t _like_ taking people photos and I avoid it as much as I can. I have no idea why, but I enjoy looking at these.
One time, at Stockholm international airport, I saw a guy from Australia who was smoking two cigarettes at the same time. I wish I’d taken a photo of him, though …
I didn’t ask them. I kept my camera around my neck and that made all the difference – no ‘should I, shouldn’t I’
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