Photography Changes You Through Others

When you photograph someone and they notice you, something changes in both of you. For them, it’s brief: a moment of self-consciousness, a decision about how to respond, then absorption back into their day. By evening, you’re probably forgotten. For you, that photograph might stay for years. Busted You’ll return to it, edit it, refine it. It might define a project or open a direction you wouldn’t otherwise have found. The person who gave you that fraction of a second, who barely registered you, becomes part of your archive, your practice, potentially the image you’re known for. The transaction is wildly asymmetrical. They offered a fragment of their existence, usually without knowing it. You kept it, transformed it, used it to change yourself. Moving through the world as someone who notices things and records what they notice gradually reshapes how you see everything. A gesture catches your eye, or the way light crosses a face, or how a person occupies a corner of a room. The shutter…