Social Distancing

Among his most memorable quotes, Robert Capa said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” Viewers will never get a feel for your subject unless you’re right up in their business. A lot of people use a long lens as a way to compensate, treating the subject like big game on safari. But with a long lens, you take no risks. It shows in the photos. They lose their urgency, their edge. You have to be the annoying hunter who climbs out of the jeep and walks right up to the pride of lions. In the genre of street photography, you’re never going to be mauled to death. But the point still holds. Or so we thought.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the situation has changed. In Toronto, and many places around the world, we have been advised to practise social distancing which means staying at home as much as possible and keeping two metres away from others. These circumstances militate against shooting Capa-style. I remember how, over the past year, there have been opportunities to play the flaneur, to dive into the crowd, to get intimate with our fellow human beings. The most obvious of these opportunities came on June 17th, 2019—the Toronto Raptors NBA Championship Parade. More than two million people flooded into the streets of downtown Toronto. It took me a half hour to cross University Avenue in order to make my way home. The street was jammed with people, like a mosh pit. It was a street photographer’s dream.

From a Covid-19 perspective, the Raptors Parade now looks like a nightmare, a perfect environment for transmitting pathogens. What will be the long term consequences of this pandemic? Will it permanently alter the way we gather in public? Will public authorities take greater care to manage crowd control? Will photographers ever again be able to follow Capa’s dictum as we try to document what happens in the streets of our cities? Now, we have our social distancing, our masks, our hand sanitizer, and our endless hand washing. Maybe something analogous will happen to our pictures: they’ll become more antiseptic, more cautious, more detached from the scene.