[leica] photographing the homeless - yo yo yo, hold up!

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

okay okay, as alistair very correctly pointed out i'm a big boy and i can 
take care of myself -- you can all stop dogpiling larry.

it's my own fault -- i don't post as much here as i used to and when i do, i 
just assume that we're all the same crowd that we've always been, without 
pause to the thought that there might be new people here who don't share our 
communal memory. 

years ago (it's shocking to think how many) on this list i'd posted ten 
things that i found most vexing about people with leicas which is in 
embarrassingly bad HTML and can be found here: 

  http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/cassidy/leicaslacker/plug/10/index.html

as i've gotten older, i've found more reasons to bend a few of them, but at 
their core, i believe they're still sound. what irks me about photos of the 
homeless is when people do it from across the street. if you're going to 
photograph the homeless, you need to be in their faces, you need to know 
their names, they need to know your name, you need to invest the time before 
you can take the credit. want to photograph the homeless? do it like mary 
ellen mark, if you're not willing to get your fingers dirty, leave them 
alone, don't pretend you're being socially responsible by turning your head 
long enough to steal a shot at 1/125 of a second before trodding home in 
your mephisto walking shoes and thinking no more about it until you hang the 
photo you entitle "how little we care" in your show at the corner coffee 
shop.

the lug actually has a laudable history of fundraising to provide a 
scholarship to send someone somewhere to photograph something. in 200...3? 
or 2002 maybe, we raised lots of money to send a photography student to 
romania to photograph the homeless kids living in the sewers. he spent three 
months in the sewers, getting dirty, getting beaten up, having his heart 
broken again and again, and he produced some really amazing, shocking, 
captivating, and beautiful photographs that we should all be proud of. 
that's the right way.

i apologise to larry -- he walked into a party in progress. it's 
heartwarming that so many people will stand up for me, but it's really my 
bad.  i'm sorry about that larry.

anyway -- i'm very interested in carrying on a discussion of how we as 
photographers approach delicate situations -- when are we taking advantage 
of people?  when are we doing a service? when do you photograph tragedy, and 
when do you put your camera down.



keep pushing that shutter button, it'll come unstuck,

kc