Author, mentor, and photographer Gill Moon talks of her love for calmer landscapes finding beauty in the detail, giving others a voice within her books about nature and the environment. Also today, Valérie Jardin returns for part 2 of her series on making better street photographs, today - the art of the grab shot. There's inspiration to make a photographic road trip that you've been planning your whole life, how privacy laws affect your right to make pictures in public, photographing markets in The Gambia, camera art and finding peaceful moments away from the day job photographing crime scenes.

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REFERENCES AND GALLERIES FROM TODAY’S SHOW

AFRICA ‘24 EXPEDITION AND PHOTOWALK RETREAT.
This month’s assignment, by Alys Tomlinson.
Glen Shepherd’s Light Theory Photography Instagram grid.
Lake Superior facts, Valérie Jardin’s lakeside location for the first photograph in today’s Visual Stories feature, and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, inspiration for the second.
Valérie’s Summer Vibes series.
Paul Choy’s episode (388) when he talked of the power of the word, hello.
Ghost ships that reportedly still sail and haunt the Great Lakes.
Wallace Shackleton’s aviation photography adventures on SmugMug and Flickr.
VOTE in this year’s British Podcast Awards for your favourite podcast.
The sailing barge that our guest Gill Moon converted, just because I knew you’d be intrigued as to what one looked like inside and out!

GILL MOON

Gill Moon’s photography above and below. See Gill’s publishing work and her appearance on Channel 5 (for those subscribed to the channel).

VALÉRIE JARDIN

In today’s Visual Stories feature, Valérie talks of making grab photos. With vacation season upon us, how can you make photos briskly without affecting family time together?

STEVE SHREVE

NEALE JAMES

Sketchbook pictures from today’s walk recording.

VIDEO LIBRARY

The following videos/subjects are referenced within today’s show.

A non-photographic movie, with plenty of nods to making pictures, suggested by Glen Shepherd.

A scene from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with an important photographic lesson.

Gill Moon found herself inspired by Swallows and Amazons when moving to Suffolk to start a holiday business aboard a sailing barge.

FURTHER RESEARCH AND REFERENCE

From Christopher Parsons, as referenced within the show today.

Hi Neale,

I’ve been mulling in my head for the past while a few things that have come up on a number of Photowalk/Extra Mile episodes. In particular, as a street photographer, what it means for some places to bar capturing images of people who haven’t consented to be photographed (and AI…but more on that in a bit).

I should probably start by stating my priors:

as a street photographer I *always* try to include people in my images, and typically aim to get at least some nose and chin. No shade to people who take images of peoples’ backs and I do this too! But I think that capturing some of the face’s profile can really bring many street photos to life. (While, at the same time, recognizing that sometimes a photo is preferred because people are walking away from the camera/towards something else in the scene.)
I, also, am usually pretty obvious when I’m taking photos; I find a scene and often will ‘set up’ and wait for folks to move through it. And when people tell me they aren’t pleased or want a photo deleted (not common but it happens sometimes) I’m usually happy to do so. I shoot between 28-50mm (equiv.) focal lengths and so it’s always pretty obvious when I’m taking photos, which isn’t the case with some street photographers who are shooting at 100mm+. To each their own but I think if I’m taking a photo the subjects should be able to identify that’s happening and take issue with it, directly, if they so choose to.

Anyhow, with that out of the way…

If you think of street photography in the broader history of photography, it started with a lot of images with hazy or ghostly individuals (e.g. ‘Panorama of Saint Lucia, Naples’ by Jones or ’Physic Street, Canton’ by Thomson or ‘Rue de Hautefeuille’ by Marville). Even some of the great work; Cartier-Bresson, Levitt, Bucquet, van Schaick, Atget, Friedlander, Robert French, etc etc include photographs where the subjects are not clearly identified. Now, of course, some of their photographs include obvious subjects, but I think that it’s worth recognizing that many of the historical ‘greats’ include images where you can’t really identify the subject. And… that was just fine. Then, it was mostly a limitation of the kit whereas now, in some places, we’re citing the limitations of the law.

Indeed, I wonder if we can’t consider the legal requirement that individuals’ identifiable images not be captured, as potentially a real forcing point for creativity that might inspire additional geographically distinctive street photography traditions: think about whether, in some jurisdictions, instead of aperture priority being a preferred setting, that shutter priority is a default, with speeds of 5-15 second shutters to get ghostly images (the ND filter manufacturers will go wild!).

Now, if such a geographical tradition arises, will that mean we get all the details of the clothing and such that people are wearing, today? Well…no. Unless, of course, street photographers embrace creativity and develop photo essays that incorporate this in interesting or novel ways. But street photography can include a lot more than *just* the people, and the history of street photography and the photos we often praise as masterpieces, showcase that blurred subjects can generate interesting and exciting and historically-significant images.

One thing that might be worth thinking about is what this will mean for how geographical spaces are created by generative AI in the future. Specifically:

These AI systems will often default to norms based on the weighting of what has been collected in training data. Will they ‘learn’ that some parts of the world are more or less devoid of people based on street photos and so, when generating images of certain jurisdictions, create imagery that is similarly devoid of people? Or, instead, will we see generative imagery that includes people whereas real photos will have to blur or obfuscate them?
Will we see some photographers, at least, take up a blending of the real and the generative, where they capture streets but then use programs to add people into those streets scapes based on other information they collect (e.g., local fashions etc)? Basically, will we see some street photographers adopt a hybrid real/generative image-making process in an effort to comply with law while still adhering to some of the Western norms around street photography?

Further, while I identify as a street photographer and avoid taking images of people in distress, the nature of AI regulation and law means that there are indeed some good reasons for people to be concerned about the taking of street photos.

For example, companies such as Cleaview AI (in Canada) engaged in the collection of images and, subsequently, generated biometric profiles of people based on scraping publicly available images.

Most people don’t really know how to prevent such companies from being developed or selling their products but do know that if they stop the creation of training data—photographs—then they’re at least less likely to be captured in a compromising or unfortunate situation.

It’s not the photographers, then, that are necessarily ‘bad’ but the companies who illegally exploit our work to our detriment, as well as to the detriment of the public writ large?

All to say: as street photographers, and photographers more generally, we should think broader than our own interests to appreciate why individuals may not want their images taken in light of technical developments that are all around us. And importantly, the difference is that we *do* often share our work whereas CCTV cameras and such do not, with the effect that the images we take can end up in generative AI, and non-generative AI training data systems whereas the cameras that are monitoring all of us always are (currently…) less likely to be feeding the biometric surveillance training data beast.

Anyhow, hope that this made a bit of sense after muddling through it for the past couple of weeks. Hope that you’re well and thanks again for all the work that you do to encourage and foster the Photowalk community! My recent images—likely taken while listening to a Photowalk, Extra Mile, or Fujicast episode—are all at: https://glass.photo/christopherparsons

Cheers,

Chris

PS: You’ve asked a few times about what focal length people ‘see’ in and why. At this point, I think I mostly see 35mm (equiv) just because I’ve shot well north of a few hundred thousand images with a Fuji X100F. I, also, have some ‘latent’ 50mm (equiv) vision but that’s mostly due to having shot at that length for many years when I really started to learn about photography and get more serious about trying to make images.

#389 PHOTOWALK: FIND BEAUTY IN THE DETAIL OF LIFE