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Transcript

Wide Open · Letter to America

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: A fairly famous Instagram photographer came to visit Istanbul and invited followers in town to join him on a photo walk in an older part of the city.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I signed up and found myself on a corner with a half dozen of us carrying camera equipment around our necks that could be worth many times more than the net worths of the people around us.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a historically foreign neighborhood, once European traders, and more recently a toehold into Turkey for migrants from Syria, Central Asia, and other conflict zones around the region.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: After a brief chat and introductions, the group of us headed down the hill into the heart of the neighborhood, an area that's been walked and photographed for many decades by many, including one photographer in particular, that defined the genre of street photography in Turkey, Aragular.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: He met and became friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson, who invited him to join the Magnum Photo Agency.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was the first Near East correspondent for Time Life and became a globally renowned master of his craft, affectionately known as the Eye of Istanbul.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is impossible to walk these streets with a camera and not feel his watchful gaze.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: As people started to spread out and take pictures, people on the street were curious, not resistant, but alert and wondering why this group of foreigners was taking pictures in their neighborhood.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Someone approached me and asked me what we were doing, and I answered that it was kind of like a class.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: A professional photographer sharing his skills with us as we walked around and took pictures.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: He smiled and I asked if it was okay.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: He said sure, and I took his picture.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: The street saw what happened and felt suddenly secure in the knowledge that these weren't just tourists taking holiday snaps of exotic locals.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: These were photographers honing their craft.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that we chose them, their neighborhood, a compliment, not a novelty or some orientalist field trip.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've found that being male in my late fifties, with salt and pepper hair and the Turkish body language of belonging, I can go anywhere and shoot any photo.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Kids asked to have their pictures taken.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: A tailor saw me take a photo of a greengrocer and asked why I wasn't taking her picture.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes an icebreaker for banter, curious, comedic, joyful.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: The camera on my shoulder focuses my senses.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I notice light, color, contrast, shapes, faces, expressions.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful kind of alert that's not predator or prey, just tuned in to the aesthetics and artistic potential of the environment.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's meditative, seeing the vintage cars, the street animals, kids playing, people at work, at play, the watchful gaze of omnipresent grandmas in windows, on stoops.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's heaven to me.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: The difference between a walk and a photo walk is like the difference between grape Kool-Aid and a fine wine.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sipped, savored.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a kind of slow thinking that comes from wandering, meandering, browsing, and pondering.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: A combination of a lot of stimulation and heightened senses, with not really having anything particular to accomplish and no real deadline.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Time flying and standing still in a way that feels like the essence of being alive.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's a highlight to me of living in Istanbul and traveling beyond, hitting the streets of Washington Heights in New York, the back alleys of Mahdi in Cairo, Valencia Street in San Francisco.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Curious, connected, not a threat.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm one of you.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I belong.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love what I see.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm making your portrait, not taking a picture.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: I take a lot of photographs, thousands a year.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The vast majority are portraits, or proxies I use to practice, flowers, statues, and pets.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I've swung between very interested and obsessed.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent quite a bit of money chasing the latest and greatest gear.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: A decade in, what I've learned is that my son was right.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing he told me when he started studying photography was that the best equipment is what you have with you, and a great photo can be shot on any camera.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, there are tricks that can make a good photo look great.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: A fast 50 millimeter shot wide open on a low F-stop at a meter or so, crisp focus on the eyes, everything else fading to buttery smooth blur.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: 90% of the time, I feel totally safe and free to wander and observe.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been warned as a young kid, probably by well-intentioned and unconsciously racist tourists, that the Maasai in Kenya believe a photo can steal your soul.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out, that's mostly a story tourists tell about them.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: What the Maasai actually object to is being treated as props, strangers taking their image and walking away with it, nothing offered back, not even dignity, which isn't superstition.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most reasonable objection in the world.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Less obviously, I feel this with a far greater frequency on the streets of New York or California than I do in any other country, especially on road trips cross country.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: A camera feels like a weapon when drawn on a street in most neighborhoods now.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't always like this, but in the last decade I feel the tension.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you taking my picture?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is asked with suspicion and even anger, not curiosity.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Invariably, I start to hesitate.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't shoot first, ask questions later.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm questioning every shot, every subject, every block.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: The joy is gone.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I start to feel the flip side of the tension on that street.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to take a picture of someone who doesn't want their picture taken.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can't admire the light or the look and try to capture it if that person cannot share the moment with me, seeing what I saw and appreciating it.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: When a portrait is great, it is a shared experience between the photographer and the subject.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's an often unspoken agreement that there is love of life in seeing beauty, a moment of joy, a flash of light, and capturing that fraction of a second forever.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like a tiny moment of immortality frozen and preserved in time.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're fearful, then it feels like a predator is stalking you.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's no space for beauty or joy or art when I'm scared.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And whether I know it or not, whether I can feel it consciously or not, there's so little certainty, so little security, that everything feels like it could be a threat.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like everything is in flux.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone is angry, the flip side of fear.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: So out of the blue, some jerk points a camera at you and makes you want to punch me in the face.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not exactly a recipe for fine art photography.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to leave my camera in the bag.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are people in my life that I photograph all the time.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: None more than my wife.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Literally thousands of pictures.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've picked up my phone, a camera, a new lens, and every combination, thousands of times over decades.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've taken her picture when she was asleep, looking away, smiling, glaring, crying, laughing.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: At this point, I'm not sure she really registers that I'm photographing her.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It just happens.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: I could do a show or a book that only features photos of her.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: She's hard to read.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Very hard.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow the portraits help.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing and being seen.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're sharing the nonverbals that define a moment and maybe a lifetime.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first place I noticed the quality in portraits that makes them something that transcends that moment.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's when the photographer's eye sees something in the subject's eye that moves them unconsciously to release the shudder.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the piece that can't be faked or photoshopped, that doesn't require expensive equipment or tons of experience.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's the moment of eye contact that captures an ineffable quality that can be recognized instantly in the photo, but is impossible to describe in words.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: My two favorite recent photos of my father capture that quality and illustrate it beautifully.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: One was shot by me, intentionally, and with a fancy camera and lens.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: The other was captured by my young nephew on an iPhone.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody else could have made those portraits.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The love in a father or grandfather's eyes, the obvious affection in the moment that my nephew and I felt and wanted to capture forever.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those photos will be passed on to later generations.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're the whole point, the buzz of making a portrait.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I will chase that high for as long as I can focus a lens and push a shutter release, or just lift an iPhone, to make a connection, by catching someone's eye on the street.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: I remember an occasion when I stood outside a camera shop on Chestnut in the marina of San Francisco.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was testing an old lens that I love.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: A young man stood outside on the sidewalk, the weight of the world, and his son in a backpack on his shoulders.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: A second child in a stroller in front of him.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was Father's Day.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I lifted the camera to my eye and shot a frame.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: He turned, glaring, and asked, Did you take my picture?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: An accusation, not a question.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I stepped towards him and turned the camera around to show him the image on the monitor.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: I shrugged my shoulders and said, It's Father's Day, and nobody looks more like a father today than you.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't help it.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: He laughed.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I asked if he wanted me to delete it.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: He smiled, a strained smile, and said, No, it's okay.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I replied, I have two boys myself.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: It gets easier.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: His smile momentarily unforced.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handalin from Istanbul.