Nice story!
I can feel how fulfilling it was for the photographer to hear that
reaction.
Personally, I consider doing that type of photo job as a big challenge.
The story brought up from the memory the situation I experienced several
years ago:
As many people here probably know, I've been photographing dancers for
many years. Occasionally, I had people asking me not to photograph them.
In most such cases, you wouldn't see any "obvious" concerns about how they
looked (you know, the usual social stereotypes of bad looks: 6 arms, 40
legs, 7 eyes, bad hair, ... ). But I respect those requests. And they are
usually done in a very polite way.
Once, at a relatively small outdoors dance party, about 8 years ago,
I had a very unusual situation.
I was taking photographs of the dancers (being just outside the perimeter
of the dance floor). At some point two dancers were dancing together,
and that couple that was both dancing well, and looking well (and being
quite "photogenic" even outside of the dance floor).
So, during the song sequence that they danced together, I was
photographing them a bit more than others. Very suddenly in the middle of
a song (which is a rather rare case altogether in the social dance
culture and especially in the dance community in question), the
women stopped dancing, turned to me, and asked to stop photographing in a
rather strong voice. And then she went back and resumed dancing. I was
surprised by such a reaction, but honored that request. I saw that a few
other dancers were also puzzled by such an abrupt reaction. (It was
one of the "home" dance communities for us, - so quite a few dancers in
that community knew me.)
A week later, I posted the gallery of photos from that dance party online,
to my photography web site. While preparing it, I was debating with myself
if I should include the photos of that dancer (and especially with that
partner) that I had taken prior to the request.
I was still feeling very puzzled if not shocked by the somewhat rude way
of expressing that preference. Besides, the request was not about not
using the photos but not taking them anymore, and it came close to the
end of the dance party, not in the beginning. After long internal
deliberations, I decided to include those photos.
Soon after, I received a surprising e-mail from that dancer, apologizing
for her reaction, and asking how she can buy multiple prints for 4 photos.
At some point, she was even considering an enlargement of
one photo (to a large size, above 8"x12", IIRC).
She wrote:
"It's ironic because I'm the one who snapped at you for taking my
picture. Sorry about that. Typically I absolutely hate having my picture
taken. But I had no idea these would turn out so beautiful- esp. the
black and white one."
(In my personal opinion, the photos were not special, - just my
usual photos from dance events, except for the black-and-white, which
was indeed a very interesting and rather unusual one.)
And then, in person, at the next dance party in that community, we
chatted, and she said: "In the future, please feel free to take photos of
me dancing."
It was very pleasant to hear that despite the initial strong
negative reaction, that woman enjoyed my photos of her.
Cheers,
Igor
Gonz Tue, 10 Apr 2018 10:38:33 -0700 wrote:
Nice positive article, a nice break from so much "Instagram" stuff..
https://petapixel.com/2018/04/10/a-message-to-portrait-photographers/
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