It's like this... when I see a picture I just have to click it. Am no great photographer but I love to click. And sometimes I see things in frames everywhere I look. So when I went to Union Square, a happening mall in San Fran, the best shot I thought I got was of this streetster sitting on one of the stairs with his back to the mall and playing his guitar, lost in his own world. Yeah, I have a penchant for focusing on the odd man out on the street. And I like the way they like the attention the camera gives them. At least I think so.
But N, who besides thinking that I am an "obessive camera fiend", also thinks it is highly intrusive and a breach of privacy when you randomly click people you find interesting even if you are just a harmless, awestruck tourist...I didn't think he or anyone could think that, I didn't even take the hint when he turned his back on me while I was focusing my lens on this really old but cool, tattoed biker with plaited blonde hair. He stuck out like a sore thumb in a cafe full of old and properly dressed clientele. Then, I was sternly warned not to try clicking those really interesting looking homeless dopers on our walk to Haight Ashbury, the quirky street in San Fran...They were so 70s and so hippy - I really felt like it was a flashback to the flower power era. I clutched at my camera in a daze but soon broke out of it... "
You think they are like beggars in India? They can kill you for it or at least flick your camera right under your nose."As N became more and more vocal about it, I wondered, am I really that insensitive to the feelings of people I click? Did all that cold-calling, training to focus on maximising info from time given in an interview and prodding for and wheedling information turn me into a person interested only in getting the info or photo-ops, no matter what the subject felt?
Perhaps it did... At work we are trained to ask questions, however difficult and sometimes personal. There are so many times when we need info, we have to get it no matter what and from where. The focus is on getting it. We need pictures, we click them. But then, I never gave it a thought till I found my paranoid co-traveller so affected by this... err... camera frenzy.
