David Snider's Street Pictures

I'll be honest here and say my first two reactions two the Street Pictures series by David Snider were negative. But not negative in that I was critical of Snider's work. His work gave me curiosity and joy. Rather, the negatives were more internally directed.

In his essay, he passed on wise advice that he learned in his classes in turn onto us: "It's not the heat, it's the timidity." As an amateur (for the love of it) photographer, I've often faced the challenge he had faced: how to capture spontaneous moments without the awareness of his subjects, and to deal with the occasional annoyance people give at being "found out" while I try to capture a photo. My stealth skills, or maybe it's just skill at being unimposing while taking photographs, are quite sub par.

There are interesting parallels here with reporting-based journalism. Reportage involves trying to capture the information and dealing with unfriendly subjects of information gathering, too. In the end, what matters is the one valuable, cooperative subject you get for every hostile encounter.

The second negativity involves bewilderment at how to interpret these beautiful photographs. Being a logical person, one of my earliest responses to a piece of art is, "What is it trying to convey?" More often than not, I just can't figure it out. And, truly, it seems to me that the greatest art doesn't easily give off messages. Maybe the problem is trying to figure out the message is, instead of having a direct experience.

Getting down to the nitty, I'm frankly distrustful of photojournalism. It's a byproduct of this uncertain, amorphous message that might be emitted by a photo. I think the subtle, non-logical aspect of art can almost be more coercive than any words, simply because it bypasses logical thought, and untruthful messages might get by the censor of a good editor simply because aesthetics is so much easier to judge in a piece of art than what it's saying.