Walking up Church, waiting at the light to cross Gerrard, I noticed a man feeding pigeons from his hand. He had a bundle buggy in which, presumably, he carted a big bag of bird seed. He was tall and thin, dressed in old clothes, a hunter’s cap with flaps pulled over his ears. He was unshaven and missing a tooth. He wore a latex glove on the hand he extended to feed the pigeons.
I ran to him from across the street and photographed a pigeon perched on his fingertips and pecking bird seed from his palm. He turned to me and asked what I was doing. I’m always surprised, especially when I hold my Canon 5DS slung around my neck, when people ask what I’m doing. How much more obvious could it be? Nevertheless, I explained that I was drawn by the fact that he could get pigeons to eat from his hand.
The man said I was too busy looking through my camera to see the real world.
The man’s tone was hostile. He didn’t seem hostile towards me personally. He didn’t seem hostile towards me for taking photographs. He seemed hostile towards the concept of photography.
The man said he cared for the pigeons. People are so cruel to them. They catch them and bind their feet together, tight, until they lose their feet. They can’t even breathe. Do you see that one?
The man pointed to a pigeon pecking at seed on the ground. Like a child, it seemed to know we were talking about it. It flapped its wings and landed on the man’s fingertips. The man said he had released it last week.
I wanted the man to understand that I’m not just another callous photographer, that I care about animals and abhor cruelty. Who would do such a thing? I asked.
He pointed at me. You did this. You and your camera. You want to take pretty pictures of the city, but you do not see how it really is. Ugly and cruel. You do this. Your camera does this.
The man grabbed his bundle buggy and walked away from me.
It would be easy for me to respond defensively, to close my heart to this man and to dismiss his words as the rantings of an eccentric. But then I would be denying myself the chance to learn something; after all, the man has a point. He makes explicit a concern that gnaws at me through every instant of my photographic practice. I worry that when I have a camera in hand, I am not doing what I think I am doing. I think I am a benign observer, but I may well be a malign participant. I want to dismiss Susan Sontag’s observation that “[t]here is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” but when I turn my gaze inward and observe my own practice, I see that she may be right.