Photography has been a constant companion in my life, even if it has never been an exclusive relationship – on both sides, obviously. 😉

Lately, however, I have noticed that although I still never leave home without a camera, I felt less inclined to get my camera out once I saw a scene that called out to me to be captured. 

Was I losing my drive? Did I suffer from photographer’s block? Looking at my output, it doesn’t look like it. The number of pictures taken and selected to keep in a year is still north of 9.000. I still can’t countenance being caught out there without a means to capture a moment.

So what was it?

To explore this question, I decided to part with some of my hard-earned money for a one-day street photography workshop with a photographer whose philosophical approach I found so engaging and persuasive that I recently booked some of his online classes and watched his videos on YouTube.

On a damp and grey December Monday, threatening showers and occasionally throughout the day making good on that threat, 5 of us met up with the workshop teacher in a café in Montmartre. The introduction round, asking for our expectations of the workshop, made it pretty clear that we all of us had issues with the acceptability of making candid pictures of complete strangers, which is in fact the very essence of street photography. To quote the advice of one of the great American photographers of the last century, Walker Evans: “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You’re not here long.’

But things have moved on since his days. The rise of social media and the misuse of posts there by a minority of malevolent actors and even worse, the egregious self-permission by social media companies to use the plethora of posts on their platforms to train their own generative AI LLMs without even asking for users’ consent have made the sincere and dedicated observation and documentation of daily life in our communities more of a guilty pleasure.

It shouldn’t have, though. 

First of all, the theft of online data by tech companies to profit from the aggregated individual intellectual property shared via the internet is not the fault of the people sharing their observations online. In fact, it is them who are the victims of this theft. 

Secondly, most street photographers, especially of the amateur variety, are not making pictures with the intention of getting rich by publishing them. Often – most definitely in my case – any thought of putting my photos together around a particular theme comes at the stage of being invited to a collective exhibition. The sale, if any, of prints at exhibitions hasn’t even begun to cover the continuous cost to me of learning to make pictures that anybody might even consider spending money on in the first place, plus obviously the equipment needed for that.

Still, the issue remains. What about the droit à l’image? Is it morally justifiable to take pictures of people minding their own business in public spaces? Given such questions, why would anybody still want to take pictures at all?

Here some attempts at answering such questions. The legal situation regarding the act of photographing scenes in public spaces including people is clear: it is allowed. A person, by being in public, implicitly consents to being seen by others. Asking a photographer to delete a picture they have taken is therefore actually an infringement of the personal rights of the photographer. 

However, asking what the purpose of taking the pictures is and how they will be used is perfectly legitimate. The problem there is that I can hand-on-heart tell you that I have no intention to publish pictures, let alone commercially, but I don’t know what opportunities could arise for my pictures 10 or 20 years down the line.

This aside, if you love looking at street photographs, you may have lingered over the pensive look on a beautiful girl’s face, staring out of a bus waiting at a traffic light, and the photographer captured this ideal example of a ‘fleeting moment’ to perfection. In purely practical terms, such an image should never be published as it is simply impossible after pressing the shutter release to jump in front of the bus, and in the lucky event of not being run over once the traffic light changes to green, ask the driver to be let on board so you can quickly ask the girl for permission to share the shot on Instagram. There are plenty of such situations, and the practicality of asking everyone in a picture just because they happen to end up in the frame is highly dubitable.

Fortunately, in France – where I am practicing my craft as a street photographer – jurisprudence on the publication of street photographs holds that the photographer’s right of artistic expression trumps the personality rights of the subject of a photograph unless the subject can prove that the publication of the image would violate their dignity or cause them serious harm.

Still, asking myself these questions every time I feel the urge to press the shutter release has come to weigh heavily on my mind, which is why I found myself on this workshop with Genaro Bardy, the very photographer who had written the linked blog post about the rights or not of street photographers. He encouraged us to make the images we wanted but to approach the people in the scenes afterwards to get into a conversation with them, being prepared for both rejection and approval. In most cases people just couldn’t be bothered to linger, which was fine by me, but some of the brief conversations afterwards were quite heart-warming.

There was the German-speaking couple sitting opposite me on the Paris Metro (which is btw not a public space), with her leaning her head on his shoulder, eyes closed, and him looking at my camera that I had in front of me, then at me and smiling. I asked him in German if I could take a shot. It turned out that I could, and then we briefly talked, ending with me taking his card to send the picture as a souvenir of their Paris trip.

And then there was the girl at Les Halles squatting with her back against the glass facade of the shopping centre, who noticed me taking pictures of her and the reflection in the window. When I started to explain what I did, she interrupted me with a smile, saying that she was used to this as her sister was also always taking pictures of her, and she encouraged me to go on if I wanted to. I gave her my number in case she wanted the picture.

My conclusions at the end of this day roaming the streets of Paris with 5 fellow photographers are: when I see a scene that touches me and makes me want to preserve it on the sensor of my camera, I will be damned if I voluntarily waive my right of artistic expression. 

And I am happy to realise that it is not really that my street photography mojo had gone, it was much more that I had begun to feel weary of justifying, even in front of myself, the pursuit of my passion because of people who feel somehow that I am doing them harm, when all I want to do is document the beauty of a moment…