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*STREETPHOTOS
of the
WEEK A several-year private Email Exhibition by G. Mark Smith -- now also available to the public at WWW.StreetPhoto.Com ...
*Streetphoto
of the Week #101/
Amsterdam BootWalker DreamScape with BootBiker in Paradise #8/
Amsterdam, Holland
*Streetphoto
of the Week #102/
Amsterdam Smokin' Scooter Blow-By/
Amsterdam, Holland
*Streetphoto
of the Week #103 a, b & c/
Old Wave Drawbridge; Turquoise-headed Delivery Driver #1, #2 & #3/
Amsterdam, Holland * A back story to Streetphoto of the Week #103 ... One morning in Amsterdam earlier this year I decided to stalk the drawbridge barriers on Kostverlorenstraat bridge over the Kostverlorenvaart (canal). While there I ended up getting some wonderful images I'd intended to use in one of my x16-panel Amsterdam DreamScapes. Consistent bike traffic was flowing past my stalk and so I wasn't pre-selecting bikers by sight but instead I set myself on instinctive autopilot mode and was working through sound and movement to capture the fast bikers peddle strokes in the gap between the green bridge barrier foundations. I had successfully captured five or six of that shot with different bikers when, BAM -- -- -- -- -- -- instead of just getting another drawbridge DreamScape image, I suddenly and surprisingly produced a wonderfully old Dutch (her bike) with contemporary Amsterdam (the hairdo) streetphoto. (See SPotWEEK #103a)
I got such a charge out of having run into a shot that so colorfully depicted the charm and cultural impact of drawbridge-thick modern Amsterdam, that while walking away from the house the next morning I decided to spend another five minutes on the drawbridge frame. When, BAM -- -- -- -- -- -- for the second day running the same new woman on that same old Dutch bike filled the screen and ... ... ... ... ... click!! (See SPotWEEK #103b)
I was bemused. Yesterday I was stoked that she and I had crossed paths in the manner it occurred. Today it was eerie, bemusing, and just a little bit creepy too ... ... ... So when I left the house and got to work the following morning I skipped right over the drawbridge (less it become too creepy) and I moved right on through Frederik Hendrik Park, over the Singelgracht (canal) and the Lijnbaansgracht (canal), down Westerstraat -- and I rounded the corner at Noorderkerk (church) ... ... ... ... ... and there she was again! The third day in a row!!! Less surprising, because this time she was off her bike and delivering letters and small packages she kept taking out of her bicycle saddle bags. It turns out that was her job and that was why I'd seen her in the neighborhood three days in a row. She and I, as it happened that month, were working the same route. So I stalked her for a delivery or three as she popped on and off her old bike across from the old church. (See SPotWEEK #103c)
The next time I'm in Amsterdam I'm going to have to take a hardcopy of one of the pictures with me and I'm going to spend a little bit of time tracking that woman down. I think she'd probably like the shot, and who knows -- maybe she'll let me follow her around for awhile and I can borrow a bike from a friend and spend a couple of hours working the old-bike/new-girl concept a bit further. And besides, she looks like another Amsterdammer I'd like to know more about! And I wonder what color her hair will be by the time I track her down? (Check out her 'Daily Shoulder Bag' fashion choices...)
*Streetphoto
of the Week #104/
High Winds & Hard Rains in the Jordaan: XXX Amsterdammertje UmbrellaScape/
Amsterdam, Holland
*Streetphoto of the Week #105/ Operation Lawrence Free Spirit DreamScape: (and Three of its Original Frames)/ Lawrence, Kansas, USA A couple of weeks ago in the Middle of another Hot American Summer... Issued on July 15, 2008 *The surprising Heart of Summer BackStory to StreetPhoto of the Week #105:
I've been a global street photographer now for 30 years this month, and next year in May I'll have lived and worked out of my two Lawrence studios for more than 30 years. And in all that time I have never really photographed the streets of Lawrence. I've taken idle pictures while running errands or while teaching students the art of street photography in Lawrence's lively downtown shopping and entertainment midway. But in all my time here I've rarely if ever left the house with the camera in hand specifically looking to capture street photography. Something about not wanting to soil my own nest. Something else about needing the invigoration of a transcontinental flight dropping me into exotic lands to get me fired up. It's always something...
But then a couple of weeks ago during the last week of June in the heart of another hot American summer, with Massachusetts Street (our Main Street) closed for repaving and with me here on a short sabbatical away from the field -- off the streets for a bit getting healthier and thus jonesing to make streetphotos -- I finally broke down and shot Lawrence! It was only for five hours over a 4-day period, less time than I typically put in during any one day out in the world -- -- but it was a start... In order to accelerate saying what I wanted about Lawrence I decided to make it a Theatrical Street Shoot (rather than my usual In The Wild method) and so during the last two hours on the last day of the session I convinced a student Sarah (who convinced her two friends Miranda and Alexa) to allow me to depict them on the streets of Lawrence in flashy high heels, flowing dresses, big hats and cool umbrellas -- representing the free spirit of the place.
The little girl with the pigtails and yellow balloon was an unplanned and pleasant (yet somehow intuitively conjured) surprise. And her showing up on the scene capped a wonderful shoot whose intention was merely to supply me enough boldly-colored and boldly-active frames to build a single x16-image Lawrence Free Spirit DreamScape (see Streetphoto of the Week #105 b). But which instead also surprisingly provided me several good (and pointedly conjured) single frame street photographs (see Streetphotos of the Week #105 a, c & d). When we were done with the shoot (x12 locations in about 90 minutes) I took my three co-conspirators Sarah, Alexa and Miranda, -- all 17 years old and heading into their senior years in high school from the heart of their last carefree school day summers ever -- to Penny Annie's Ice Cream Parlor where I treated them to ice cream cones and milkshakes as partial appreciation for them allowing me to direct them around the city in those free spirit getups.
It was real Our Town -- -- -- Lawrence style. Laid back and simple with stiletto heels and subtle bling. Sophisticated, smart and just a little bit whimsical too -- -- -- with good times, yellow balloons, and home made ice cream for everyone...
*Streetphoto
of the Week #106/
Amsterdam Blue Concerto/
Amsterdam, Holland I rounded the corner off the Lijnbaansgracht (canal) and encountered three Amsterdam police officers standing there having a discussion on the sidewalk among parallel lines of Amsterdammertje (traffic posts) lining the street in the mid-ground and background. I stalked the police for a couple of minutes hoping some kind of other stimulating Amsterdam element would serendipitously wander or bike past. I made a couple of frames using passers by as accents -- but then all of a sudden one of the cops noticed what I was doing and took a step forward toward me with his hand outstretched in a halting gesture and he ordered me to stop taking pictures of he and his colleagues. Of course I immediately let my camera hang slack and then I took a couple of steps his way to meet him as I began protesting his request. "But officer -- my name is Gary Smith," I began, "and I've been an Amsterdam street photographer for more than twenty five years now and you know very well that you can't legally stop anyone from taking your picture in a public place." I was bluffing, because I'm not really up on the finer points of Dutch law concerning troublemakers like me taking pictures of the police, but I bluffed well and he bought it, his eyes shifting left and right as he spun the card catalog of his memory wondering about the validity of my confident assertion of legal rights. "Sure," I said, "if I refuse your request, you could probably conjure up a disorderly conduct charge without much worry. But hell -- -- -- the three of you are just out here doing your jobs, not doing anything improper in the least, so what would be the harm of getting a few photographs of Amsterdam's finest at work?" "But why us?," he asked me. "Well," I told him, "say an Amsterdam girl on a flowered Amsterdam bike peddles past you three working the street and past all those Amsterdammertjes. What a great Amsterdam composition that might make?" On hearing my unblinking confidence of their Dutch law and my opinion of hard working peace officers and my hope for serendipitous artistic composition and the rest of my overtly charming explanation for stalking them -- the cop broke out into a smile (all three of them did) and we all shook hands and I returned bemused to my original vantage point -- -- -- when all of a sudden in very quick succession, a car out of view to the right stopped, the driver opened his window and asked the policeman for directions, and the musician with the interesting decorated sitar case stepped into the frame and click ... ... ... I barely had time to make the image -- the exact type of defining Amsterdam image I'd been after ever since I'd rounded the corner a couple of minutes earlier and spotted the potentially bold arrangement of local elements and imagined the possibilities. It was one of those perfect moments I get out there, and so when the officer was done giving directions to the driver and he was returning to where the other police were standing, I stepped back over to them and showed them the shot on the playback screen on the back of the camera. They looked at Streetphoto of the Week #106 and each of them smiled, two of them laughed out loud, and then the lead officer (the one walking out of the photo on the right to give directions) shook my hand again -- and then he actually apologized for having disturbed me in the first place... "Wow," I thought to myself as I continued on my way down the canal...
*Streetphoto of the Week #107/ Notes on Being Evicted by Authority for Street Photography/ (A travelogue essay with several illustrating pictures and streetphotos) *Cambridge, Massachusetts, *Amsterdam, Holland, *New Orleans, Louisiana, *Cologne, Germany, *Soweto, South Africa, *El Salvador, Central America, *Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, * Peshawar, Pakistan, *Lawrence, Kansas Issued on July 29, 2008 (*I've always thought street photography should be a contact sport...) *Cambridge, Massachusetts: Summer 2008 A few weeks ago a student of mine named Sarah Stern got back to Lawrence from a summer shoot on the streets of Boston and Cambridge in Massachusetts. She reported that while she was documenting a flavorfully colorful 18-wheel traffic snafu one day in Cambridge (see Photo Below) that she got herself evicted by the authorities for working the chaotic street too closely for too long. It seems the frustrated truck driver, stuck in his turn and being watched closely by police in case he took out the traffic light, became enraged at the sight of Sarah recording his gaffe, and began waving his arms and screaming at her -- and that's when police stepped in and evicted Sarah for creating a public disturbance while practicing street photography.
*Amsterdam, Holland: Winter 2008 In last week's issue of Streetphoto of the Week I told about how attempted evictions usually turn out for me. How I'm often able to communicate with the authority and come to a amiable solution – typically, but not always allowing me access. Like those three Dutch beat cops who heard me out and ended up granting me access just in time for me to be able to capture that sitar player sweeping gracefully through the emblematic Amsterdam street scene (see last week’s Streetphoto of the Week #106).
*The Flood of New Orleans: Summer 2005 For violent war torn or disaster-trashed streets, genial conversation doesn't cut it with the authorities -- so for those eventual obstacles to my outside-the-wire streetphoto access I always carry several helpful press passes and a lifetime practice of effectual media-to-authority schmooze. Since the months I spent photographing the streets of the El Salvador Civil War from 1982 to 1984, I've been both journalism and authority savvy and have never been stopped in 30 years of needing extreme access to one crucial circumstance or another. I used those passes and that gall and the desire for streetphoto access most adroitly during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to get past four major-league roadblocks to gain access to the Flood of New Orleans: the uniformed Louisiana State Police at one roadblock; the camouflaged Louisiana National Guard (x2 separate barricades – see Photo #2); and at the nearest to the flood checkpoint a group of seriously-focused guys dressed in black like SWAT and carrying the latest in high tech weaponry who I got past too quickly to identify, but who I took for either a city police, state police or federal Go team.
And when I got to the water's edge (where I eventually used the press passes to hitch a ride on an animal rescue boat expedition) I also had to identify myself to armed EPA officials mounting a flood water quality monitoring mission and I was even questioned by the unarmed EMTs waiting to treat rescued flood survivors, who also had been deputized by the controlling authorities to bounce infiltrating freelance pirate media like myself (see photo #3).
*Cologne, United Germany: Reunification Day: Oct. 3, 1990 Even when an authority stops me, I'm nearly always able to go over that authority's head to his or her boss and get where I need to go. An exception to that standard occurred on the night of Oct. 3, 1990, German and European Reunification Day in Cologne, Germany when I found myself accidentally-on-purpose caught between a huge angry mob of raging M-80-tossing German anarchists and about a hundred camouflaged and fully-armed German SWAT team members lined up shoulder to shoulder and set to defend with tear gas if necessary the colossal Cologne Opera House and its fancy rich Reunification night opera goers from the several hundred attackers. After an officer refused me access I used one of my press passes to get a Cologne police official standing off to the side to allow me to operate in the five-foot slot between police and police barricades where the M-80s were exploding as the angry protesters leaned over the barrier, swinging their hands through the air with obscene gestures and screaming obscenities. So I'm there working that slot for about 90 seconds, dodging taunts and the explosions and suddenly as I'm trying another shot I'm lifted a foot off the ground and I'm moving toward a break in the barrier where I'm lifted higher and thrown into the crowd. I landed on my feet and I turned around to see a huge German camouflaged trooper with gloves, shielded helmet and carrying a submachine gun walking back to his post who obviously hadn’t gotten the word from the police official who’d given me access and who had picked me up with his one free gloved hand by the collar and delivered me into the angry crowd, who surrounded me with fuming eyes and threatened to take out their fury on me – immediately accusing me of being a police plant. Well, the several press passes I quickly took out of my pocket came in more handy than they ever had before, because the authority had suddenly shifted from the police storm troopers to the closest 25 riled-up anarchists to me who where bumping up against me and accusing me of authority as I chose the pass that identified me as a (poor) American fine artist. They read the card and consulted amongst themselves for a moment and then the one holding the card handed it back to me and shouted out in German that I was OK, just an American Künstler (artist). The crowd stepped back and they brushed me off a little, shook my hand, and I even saw a couple of smiles. Then they rejoined their several hundred comrades and continued their volatile scolding of the reunified German opera rich. *Soweto, South Africa: Freedom Day Weekend, April 26, 2006 Authority is whomever is on the same street at the same time you are and who decides street photography ought to be prohibited and whom then decides to take action to stop you from taking pictures or to deny you access to get to where you need to go to get the pictures you're hunting for. It could be anything from a crazy homeless man under a bridge wielding a blunt club to the United States (not so secret) secret service. In Peshawar, Pakistan in December 2001 it was both the Pakistan police and army as well as whatever civilian street lord came rushing out of his store to greet me and then scold me as violating his space with my camera. In Rio de Janeiro it was the police and the over-officious department store security guards under the impression that photographs taken with their company's window displays in the background were prohibited. So there I found myself at midday in the slums of Seweto adjacent to Johannesburg, South Africa on the day before Freedom Day in late April of 2006, a place where gang violence was taking upward of between 15 and 35 lives each day. I'd been making some wonderful streetphotos and also making a lot of new friends, when I turned the corner and ahead of me next to a corner restaurant in a vacant lot were about a dozen young men playing an illegal game of craps on a wooden fruit box topped with an old weathered piece of plywood they'd salvaged on site. They were rolling the dice and they were leaning in to see the roll and shouting and groaning and occasionally there were cheers and expressions of winning and loosing. Under the conditions, I knew I’d shortly be stopped from taking pictures by the gang authority and that my press passes would be useless among such an outlaw posse (Badges? Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!) so I made as many shots as I could, hoping that when I'd be noticed I'd make it out of Soweto both in one piece and with my film intact (see Photo #4).
Well, when the lead gang member noticed me he came right over to me and calmly and politely asked me to stop taking pictures because, “If the police come past and see a white man in this neighborhood, their going to notice, and then they'll discover our game and there will be trouble for us.” “Might you move on down the street?” he wondered civilly, and of course I just as politely obliged because except for that time in Cologne, Germany – I generally knew when it was time to say when. Cops only put you under arrest (or apparently they sometimes throw you into a pit of furious anarchists) if you don’t comply. These guys (this authority) will make you dead, if that’s what becomes necessary… *Lawrence, Kansas: Summer, 2006 I have dozens of these stories of skirting authority in order to do my art, but those I’ve already spoken of will suffice as introduction to those times (aside from Cologne) when I somehow as a street photographer got myself arrested (not just evicted) for one thing or another. The first time was in El Salvador in the summer of 1982 and it was my most serious incident ever with authority. I had reported several times that summer from the rebel side of the front lines and had embarrassed the American Ambassador at a press conference earlier in the week with a terse question that left him no wiggle room for lies. I was, as accustomed, walking to work (from my apartment to the press hotel – the El Camino) and at a major intersection on the Pan American highway about a half mile from the hotel I was stopped by camouflaged soldiers that were waiting for me there in a parked Jeep. All four of them got out of the Jeep and leveled their Vietnam surplus M-16s at me and I raised my arms and then one of them bum-rushed me out into the middle of the intersection and forced me to lay prone, face down in the middle of the wildly converging traffic. Horns were blaring, bus fumes were noxious and men riding in the back of open trucks called out taunts as they whizzed past just feet from me and the soldier, who now rested the barrel of the machine gun square on the back of my neck – balancing the stock three feet above me as he watched the traffic hurtle by. We stayed that way for the longest time, he tormenting me in Spanish and me laying there thinking about death and wondering why one would find so many whitewall tires in a place so poor as El Salvador. It seemed like hours, the end of the barrel of the M-16 imbedding into my neck with its weight over time. But it was only about 35 minutes, and then they released me, taking the gun off my neck and all four soldiers mounting the Jeep and driving off in the direction of the Salvadoran secret police headquarters. Their mission was to scare the crap out of me, and it worked. I was scheduled to be leaving the country in 4 to 6 days, but I decided after that arrest that my work there was done, and I left the country early the next day instead. Having been denied access to an entire country by the intimidation – until I returned the following year to finish my work collecting photographs from the streets of Cold War battlefields. The second time arrested I was held was on arrival in Amsterdam that same year, fall of 1982. Four Dutch journalists had been murdered by the Salvadoran army for reporting from behind rebel lines a few weeks before my arrival in the spring of 1982, and the Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua stamps in my passport raised an alarm with Dutch immigration. So they arrested me in a calm and dignified manner and locked me up in a little cell (a cage, really) at Schippel Airport with mesh wire from the neck up and a little hardwood bench to sit on. They held me there for about 45 minutes until an agent arrived from The Hague to question me and decide weather I would be getting access to the streets of Amsterdam, my first attempt to visit a place that would eventually become my primary street photography focus and my beloved second home. He listened to my answers, went away for a few minutes, then unlocked the cage and let me go… Next came that seven-second arrest in Cologne on Reunification night in 1990 -- from the time he picked me up until I was dropped into that unruly mob. Then in December 2001 in Peshawar Pakistan and the Tribal Belt on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, I encountered several evictions from streets by street block-lords that I had no capacity to either negotiate with or ignore. Safety first, I always say… But it's the most recent time I was arrested for street photography that takes the cake for the oddest arrest ever in my career. But we also have a university here and with it comes a lot of uptight Greek houses whose discriminating ways naturally don't fit into the classless Lawrence vibe, but are tolerated because there are laws that allow that type of notion to exist and because one of the Lawrence credos is to live and let live. At the time I hadn't made much street photography in Lawrence because, as I've said recently in Streetphoto of the Week #105, I never really wanted to soil my own nest and because I typically needed the invigoration of a transcontinental flight dropping me into exotic lands to get me fired up for a shoot. But whenever I went for a long daylight hour's walk I always took the camera along just in case something amazing or at least compelling happened along the way. And so there I was, on the edge of the neighborhood near the beginning of a 15 to 20-block round trip stroll to go to the bank -- -- -- and then suddenly through a series of wacky misunderstandings and a crucial misinterpretation by an individual who had no authority but presumed she did, I was under arrest for doing my art. Under arrest while practicing ancillary street photography during a spur-of-the-moment errand in my own hometown! Under arrest in Lawrence, Kansas – Art City USA – when I was able to get through 60 countries including several dictatorial fascist states without accumulating a criminal record or (except for the Cologne eviction) even a scratch of any sort in 24 years since that 1982 face down on the Pan American Highway incident in Central America. And now I was suddenly and irrationally under arrest in my very own Lawrence, Kansas, USA. For street
photography!
“Isn't that rich,” I thought, and I told her as much, and then after a brief discussion I went over to a giant Oak Tree on the right of way to await the police. Sitting there taking an occasional picture now and then of the abandoned front yard, twirling my cane like a baton, reviewing in my mind the law that says I can make any photograph I want as long as I'm on public property, and belittling the absurdity of her thinking she can not only boss my camera around in public (Art City USA public, sister) but kick me off her sidewalk as well. And during the brief discussion we'd had the hysterical woman – the sorority president as it turned out, upset about bad singing by the new sisters during the practice or something and over-officiously trying to justify her existence by pushing me around – had called me creepy, suggesting without proof that I had sinister intent in making my streetphoto images. As if I'd been across the street with a 600mm lens stalking them from behind parked cars instead of just strolling down the street as I was. As if I were a pervert. Well, to make a long story short, the cops got there and after listening to both sides of the story (theirs from several crying young women), the two young policemen decided to issue me a ticket (even though I'd waited quietly there for 12 minutes for them to show up) for disorderly conduct, punishable by a $5000 fine and 30 days in jail. After I heard that, I took about 50 snapshots of me being ticketed, with the police never once asking me to stop because they knew they weren't allowed under law to stop me because I was still standing on a public sidewalk. My lawyer, who did the job for me in exchange for a small portfolio of photographs from the streets of Havana, Cuba in 1997, took the case into the prosecutor who immediately threw it out of court because, as my lawyer told me he'd put it, “No laws were broken here.” And besides that, my lawyer also told me, the prosecutor admitted to him that he'd gotten a good laugh out of reading in the police reports how during the brief conversation between me and the sorority scold I'd inquired of the young woman who was screaming at me for doing my art in public and trying to evict me from her sidewalk and calling me creepy, that I wondered who the f - - - she thought she was. In fact, I'd admitted to the police freely that I'd wondered that to her twice, before sitting down quietly against that giant Oak to ponder first amendment rights and the queer audacity of America's spoiled and pretentious elite when it gets out of hand... *In conclusion: *I've always thought street photography should be a contact sport...
*Streetphoto
of the Week #108/
Strolling Amsterdam Rose/
Amsterdam, Holland
*Streetphoto
of the Week #109/
Dog Run Pals #1/
Washington Square, New York, New York
*Streetphoto
of the Week #110/
Dog Run Pals #2/
Washington Square, New York, New York |
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