Seventy people in Chicago

Seventy. I had prepared for a group you could talk to in one voice, and instead there were seventy people on a Chicago pavement with cameras, which is not a workshop so much as a slow-moving crowd that occasionally stops to photograph something.

So we took a block at a time. That is the only way a group that size works: you do not march it anywhere, you give it one block, you let it spread out along the block, and you work the light on that block until it has given up whatever it had. Then you move.

Everyone asks the same thing

I spent most of that day answering one question in different forms. How do you actually walk up to someone.

Not how to meter, not which lens, not how to get the blacks that deep. People will ask those, and they are the easy ones, and answering them is a way of avoiding the real one. The real one is that a street portrait requires walking up to a stranger and saying something, and almost nobody wants to do that.

It takes a sentence and about forty seconds. The hard part is not the sentence.

I do not have a trick for it. What I have is the observation that the frame worth keeping is almost always the one right after they stop posing, which means the conversation has to last a beat longer than feels comfortable. You ask, they arrange their face, you wait, and the picture is in the moment where they give up on arranging it.

Why a walk beats a lecture

A workshop where somebody talks at you about black and white photography is a comfortable afternoon and it changes nothing. You cannot learn the uncomfortable part by hearing it described, because the difficulty was never intellectual. It is entirely about standing on a pavement with your heart going and doing it anyway.

What the walk actually provides is other people doing the same uncomfortable thing beside you, at the same time, badly at first. That is the whole mechanism. It is the only reason any of us get better at it.

By the middle of the afternoon people who had spent the first hour photographing buildings were talking to strangers. Nothing I said did that. Watching the person next to them do it did.

Where next

New York, Paris, Medellín, Zurich, Chicago. Every one of those came out of walking a city slowly with a rangefinder and no plan, and the walks have started following the same pattern.

I am picking the next city by who asks. If you want it somewhere, say so on the events page, and if enough people name the same place I will start looking at dates. I am serious about that.

Thanks to Tamarkin Camera for hosting, and to everyone who spent a July day walking a block at a time.