Should I shoot that guy?

My wife had noticed a man following us about 25 feet back. He seemed nice enough and was wearing a suit jacket, occasionally he spoke into a radio. We asked our guide who he was; he said a policeman who was a friend of his, hired to watch our backs for pickpockets and keep the more aggressive street vendors from swarming us.

In addition to our guide, and the rear-guard, there was another man whose sole job seemed to be watching me and my photo selection. I had taken a photo of a woman, most likely Muslim, sitting in the street selling vegetables and apparently this was not a good thing. We were in Tetouan, at the Souk or Sunday market, in Morocco.

The tiny alleys were impossibly narrow and dark and I imagined that if we had no escort this whole thing might go quite differently. At one point I went to take a picture of a man in a shoe repair/ cobbler type of store which appeared to have been inherited from his great grandfather. It was a crevice maybe six feet wide and filled with old leather and tools with the man’s lined face barely visible in back, this was the scene I came so far for. He saw me photographing him however, and making an angry noise, he came after me!

Should I shoot that shot? Sometimes I wonder. Am I being rude, am I intruding, do I have any rights in this photographic interlude that I travelled so far and paid so much money to achieve?
Ethics in photography gets a lot of play now in terms of talking about digital manipulation of images, what is real and what is photo-shopped fake? Also talk of “staged” news story images, and the meanings and context possibly being changed, are debated. Nature photography is concerned with disturbing animals that may be endangered. Here however, I am speaking of taking pictures of people, in their natural surroundings, for my own pleasure and use while traveling.

I wouldn’t mind asking for a release or even paying for a shot of people on a foreign street or going to Sunday market in Morocco but it just takes so much time. After a tedious negotiation I am usually rewarded with a posed “touristy” picture that I wanted to avoid in the first place. For me the ideal is to photograph people in their natural surroundings living life undisturbed and unaware, therein lies the problem. If they knew they were being photographed would they object? If they don’t know and they are not interfered with, is it OK? I mean no harm and simply want to capture my wonderful adventure to share with friends and family for the most part. So do I have that right?

Oftentimes, in situations where I want to be incognito, I will use the flip-out 360 degree LCD screen to make it appear I am doing, or looking at, something else other than my subject. Also, sometimes with a smaller camera I might set the timer and put the camera on a table out of the way and out of mind, to capture an image. When the camera is up to my face and aimed right at someone, it can be quite intimidating. People certainly wonder; what is he doing, what does he want with me? This is true whether in Seattle or across the world.

Each situation is different and some are hard to decipher. My personal guide tried to steer me by saying “ah… this is a nice picture”, and pointing, he thought helpfully, at one of his standard kitsch scenes. I tried to be nice and show interest and occasionally snapped the shutter.
In this way we seemed to balance in a ying-yang of privacy and perceived decorum against my eye’s hunger for the exotic and spicy marketplace images I wanted to burn in my memory, for the rest of my life.

Seattle Times Article-Travel in Spain

Special to The Seattle Times


When traveling around the world, some things seem universal — toddlers playing peek-a-boo and taxi drivers lying to you.
The drivers don't stretch the truth just to gouge their fares; there exists a variety of reasons for their ploys. Indeed, many places, fed up with their antics, have provided set rates or fare readouts to control them.
My wife, Lisa, and I were at the Castillo de Castellar in the Andalusia section of Spain and had requested a taxi to drive us to the next town north where we could catch the train to Ronda. The driver stated, "No, the train does not stop there."
I told Lisa, "Five bucks says he's lying," and of course he was. He wanted to go back and join his knot of friends drinking café con leche, smoking cigarettes and discussing soccer.
Ah well, it pays to be flexible.
We had arrived at the Castillo de Castellar train station four hours early. Inexplicably, the schedule we'd received from our hotel was wrong, most likely out of date. So, looking to kill some time, we resurrected an idea we'd had before — the "hippie castle." I had read that some time back, hippies had moved into an old castle, squatted there and set up some kind of Bohemian village.
This is where dragging along a heavy laptop and a bit of research the night before help out. It is always nice to have options.
So off we went, up the mountain. There were virtually no tourists, or guides, or any money-draining devices, just a walled castle with people living and working inside. There were literally cottages, si viende (for sale) there, too, and a couple of places for rent.
Walking along, seeing the stones in the street and old stone stairs, I could imagine the hundreds of feet over hundreds of years that wore them to their current smooth patina. I thought of someone pulling a cart or carrying a baby through the old town. The fact that people were living there now added to the image. It was an anti-sterile-museum tonic; it seemed more accessible to my imagination.
The train ride to Ronda took us slowly up in elevation and it reminded me of the Ellensburg area. It started to rain, and when we finally got there it was pouring. We started off to find "the bridge." I didn't have the actual name on my lips, but an Internet search of Ronda, Spain, always shows the same picture of an amazing bridge, spanning a deep chasm between two plateaus cut by a river.
Of course, many tourists were already standing in doorways, out of the deluge, looking at travel books, trying to determine the same thing.
By the time we got to the bridge, we were soaked. I had my larger camera in its case in the backpack wrapped up to stay dry, and I was using my small weatherproof Olympus trying to capture this stunning view. After struggling a bit, I determined only Ansel Adams in a helicopter could do Ronda photographic justice.
Drying off in a "matador bar," my wife and I debated running for the train or waiting it out. Madly, we decided to go for it. We walked crazily through the rain, dodging umbrella points as fast as we could. Wet and exhausted, we cheered when we realized we were right on time.