Each person a kind of archetype

The day after I wrote about my other photo at the Photographers’ Gallery café (see the previous post), I visited the gallery again, and as luck would have it (and thanks to the brilliant spatial imagination of O’Donnell + Tuomey architects), I encountered these gentlemen from this unusual viewpoint. When I saw the photo at home, it occurred to me that it could actually sit next to the photo of the ‘beautiful’ woman at the café.

I took both photos with a 28mm lens from a rather close distance, but this time, taking the photo didn’t seem to be that intrusive, as oddly enough there was a glass between me and the subjects! Also, I didn’t get as much of a creepy feeling from taking the photo, maybe because as a hetero man, I was only reasonably stimulated (or intimidated) by the ‘beautiful’ men, or maybe because intruding on men by a male photographer is not judged as much by the society. At the same time, I have more of a bad conscious publishing this photo, as it seems to get a bit more into private moments of people’s lives. Nonetheless, the photo gives me another angle to think about the ethics of street photography and the multifaceted beauty of humans and their relationships.

I’d like to finish this note by a quote from the photographer Philip-Lorca Dicorcia that I relate to very much: “People represent things to me, they are not personal, each person is a kind of archetype, which I manipulate to appear to be the archetype that I am thinking about, although most of the time they are not like that, they just appear like that. You have to sensitise yourself to the subtle clues, and there is very little on the outside that will tell you what the person is really like on the inside”.