“If you can smell the street by looking at the photo,

then its a street photo.”

duckrabbit was blown away by the Bruce Gilden audio slideshow that I featured in a post earlier this week.

I was getting a feeling from his photographs that suggested a real antagonism between himself and the people he was photographing.  To me it appeared that he was in some way able to conjure the underlying emotions of that person to the surface. There’s a chemistry and depth there that I’m not used to when looking at photographs. Its like Gilden has closed the distance between the viewer and those being photographed. The detachment is gone and replaced with something very raw.

Good journalism isn’t always observational, its often based on intervention. Think about how an interviewer will probe an interviewee. When Gilden talks about ‘ethics’, he is talking tongue firmly in cheek. He’s saying that the photographers ego is always there, one way or another, so to criticize him for the way he works it is to criticise all photographers. Personally I find a real honesty in his approach. He’s confrontational because he doesn’t know any other way and because it often reveals something that we wouldn’t otherwise see. His photographs don’t hide the fact that they are sometimes an intrusion on peoples lives.

He’s taken the art out of photography and replaced it with startled and numb humanity. He’s just not interested in beauty.

I suspect this video of Gilden doesn’t do a very good job of illustrating his work, but it certainly made me understand a little deeper his approach.  Aside from that it’s very, very entertaining.

Gilden as a person doesn’t demand you take his work seriously, but his work does.

UPDATE:

The great Stan Banos Adds:

He may not be interested in beauty per se, but how many photographers achieve this…

duckrabbit Answers:

None? No doubt this picture goes well beyond ‘beauty’.

Related posts:

1. David Hurn interview on Photo Histories- epic
2. Fancy a drink Dave?…Damn you smell FINE says handy bendy Mandy..
3. Be a boxer, own a monkey and play the drums…