Advice from David Turnley

David Turnley, long one of my favorites, visited John Dykstra’s classroom last month and passed along some advice on street photography. Deep down in that link there’s a segment about what we call poverty tourism – the current trend of going someplace just to see how the other half lives.

Nobody likes people with big lenses who just walk by, take a portrait with your face, and passes on without a second glance as if you weren’t worth a dime more than the 30Mb file on their memory card.

Several things in there I’m borrowing, especially the part about touching other people – it’s far too easy to do the drive-by shoots, to never really get to know people. Too often we point a camera more often than we listen, worried we will miss a moment instead of being cognizant we are preventing them.