The first photographic workshop I ever took wasn’t really a workshop at all. It was a class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism when I was a student there in 1966-67. If memory serves, it was three full days spread over three weeks. It was taught by Arthur Rothstein, one of the photographers recruited by FDR’s Farm Security Administration to document rural America during the Great Depression. Rothstein’s photograph of a farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, became the iconic image of the devastating drought.
Of course, Rothstein’s historical importance was lost on me and most of my classmates, for whom the photography “course” was just another box to be ticked on the way to graduation and hopefully — a job. But at least it got us out of the classroom. On the first day, Rothstein handed out film cameras to the dozen or so of us in attendance, and with very little fanfare, told us to go out and shoot a roll of film without leaving the Columbia campus, in upper Manhattan.
That first outing struck me as photography as sport, and my competitive juices began to flow. Though only 25 at the time, I’d been taking pictures — mostly snapshots — for a decade or more. So while my classmates were photographing buildings, pigeons and each other, I tried for more distinctive images. (Full disclosure: the picture I took of a classmate sitting on the grass, leaning against a sign that read “Keep Off The Grass” was about as lame as it gets.) But my photo of shadows cast by two campus policemen on a brick pathway would earn me a “nice picture” from Mr. Rothstein when we convened again a week later.
For our second photographic safari, Mr. Rothstein decreed that all of Manhattan was fair game. He also charged us with trying to capture a photograph that could grace the front page of the next day’s New York Times. To help narrow down the possibilities, he handed out mimeographed copies of the Associated Press’s “schedule” of the day’s news events. I chose the funeral of four fallen firemen at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.
But when I got there, I found that my J-School ID card neither impressed the police nor admitted me to the area designated for the press. And standing in back of the crowd gathered in front of the church precluded my getting a shot that said “firemen’s funeral,” much less one suitable for any newspaper’s front page.
Looking around I saw a tall building across the street. With uncharacteristic bravado I marched myself across Fifth Avenue, strode purposefully into the building’s elevator and rode it to the top floor. Once on the roof, I made my way to its edge, my heart thumping wildly, and found a perch overlooking the cathedral. I’d gotten there just in time, as fireman were already carrying the first of four flag-draped coffins up its steps. I focused my camera and snapped away. I still think The New York Times could have run my firemen’s funeral photo the next day.
Of course, that didn’t happen but a week later I got, or like to think I got, another “nice picture” from Mr. Rothstein — a rare moment of exultation. I don’t remember anything else Arnold Rothstein said in class, but I’ve never forgotten the two lessons his workshop imparted: don’t follow the crowd and do whatever you must, within reason, to get the shot.
There was something else I learned in those three days: competition made me braver than shooting by myself. And led to better pictures!
I was a reporter for Time magazine when I took my next workshop, a couple of years later; it was conducted by Harvey Stein, a renowned documentary and street photographer then teaching at the International Center of Photography. Though my vocational currency was words and sentences, I often took my Nikon F on reporting assignments and, once finished scribbling in a notebook, often snapped a few pictures. I must have been counting on Harvey to up my game. (Over the course of the three plus years I worked at Time, the magazine published about a dozen of my photographs. Not surprisingly, the magazine’s staff photographers were not amused, and understandably, complained that I was tromping on their turf. Sorry guys.)
I remember Harvey Stein as a genial, encouraging and helpful teacher, and I remember being glad I had taken his workshop. But my notes from it are long lost; the one thing I remember him telling us was very valuable: if you want to improve, you’ve got to get out and take pictures. Every day, if possible, but at least several times a week.
Though I ignored that dictum for years — decades! — it was a lesson I took to heart when I retired as a magazine editor in 2011. Today as part of my daily uniform I wear a Sony X110F on my belt. (Why is it that on the rare occasion I fail to put it on I invariably miss a great photograph?)
Although there are cameras with faster and sharper lenses, not to mention more bells and whistles, they are usually heavier and more cumbersome than my little Sony. Quite literally they don’t wear well at all. Besides, its Zeiss lens is probably as good, if not better, than anything Alfred Stieglitz or Edward Steichen ever dreamed of. And most of the time it’s quite good enough for the kind of street photography I most enjoy.
In looking over my contact sheets from my years at Time (1968 to 1971), I’m guessing that the one taken in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village was shot under Mr. Stein’s tutelage. The photograph I like best from that includes a man in a top hat playing a kazoo. Runner up is a shot of a crew-cut protestor carrying a sign urging passersby to “Remember Pearl Harbor,” though I’m not sure why he looked so perturbed those many years later. (I’m guessing he supported the then-raging Vietnam War.)
Many years would pass before I enrolled in another workshop, and in fact, for almost a quarter century, beginning in 1983, I focused mainly on our twin sons’ antics and growth spurts. But for a 5-day trip in September, 2019, Google-ing “Street photography Amsterdam” directed me to a workshop given by Annet de Graff, described online as “a well-known international iPhone photographer” who had once led Tim Cook on a photographic tour of her beautiful city. I figured if Annet was good enough for the CEO of Apple, she was quite good enough for me, and I booked a half-day with her for the day after our arrival.
Annet turned out to be an enthusiastic and knowledgeable photo guide, who led me first to Amsterdam’s notorious Red Light district. Since it was morning, the area was quiet and peaceful, with not a hint of the oldest profession in evidence. In fact, the people I encountered looked like early morning workers to be found in any city in the world. I photographed a woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house, a sanitation worker tidying up the streets and a man selling used clothing from his truck.
Annet is a great believer in the kind of patience I entirely lack. When you find a promising photogenic location, she advises, “wait and try to anticipate what might happen. Is the bicyclist casting a long shadow on the street? Will that woman sheltering from the rain open her red umbrella? Then attack with your shutter.”
She told me she likes to imagine she’s on a movie set. What she encounters there — walkers on a stroll, elegant swans or adorable dogs — are the actors, but she’s the director. On my half day with her, she put her philosophy on display. As friendly and outgoing as a Labrador puppy, her openness set her subjects — who became mine — at ease. Her manner proved contagious, and I found myself chatting up strangers with uncharacteristic abandon
Maybe that’s why the photographs I took under Annet’s tutelage were…only ok. And mostly portraits. Not Annet’s fault, to be sure, but I think geniality works better for her, and for portraiture, than it does for me and street photography. Normally, I make myself as unobtrusive as possible, avoid looking my subjects in the eye or engaging them in small talk. I want them doing things, ideally remarkable things, not smiling at the camera, exuding bonhomie.
Which may be the lesson of the day: in street photography there are no rules. What works for you (or Annet), may not work for me, and vice versa.
Or as the great Indian street photographer Vineet Vohra put it in the workshop I took with him a few months later, “There is no standard plan, no pattern from which to work. You must be on the alert with the brain, the eye and your heart.”
I’d scarcely unpacked by suitcases from my trip to Amsterdam before I learned that Vohra, whose work I had long admired, would be conducting a workshop in Miami. I signed up for it immediately.
On the first day of Vineet’s five-day workshop, held at the History Miami Museum in downtown Miami, he showed the half dozen photographs each of us had submitted to gain our places in the workshop. (My pictures fell somewhere in the middle. I felt there were one or two A students, several Bs, many Cs, and a couple of Ds. I gave myself a C, maybe a C+ if grading on a curve.)
After the show-and-tell, Vineet discussed the two kinds of street photographers: hunters and fishermen (and fisherwomen). Hunters, not surprisingly, are constantly on the move, their cameras at the ready, always on the lookout for Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. Fishermen, on the other hand, are patient, who when they find themselves in a promising spot, wait. And wait. And more often than not, wait some more.
“Hunters,” Vineet reminded us, “go where the ducks are.”
He was just warming up. “Street photography,” he pronounced, “is subjective. Journalistic photography is objective.” He urged us “to look for the subjective interpretation that tells the story.
“Travel photography,” he continued, “should make you want to visit a place; street photography should make you want to visit the moment.”
Then, more practically, he told us to be attentive to backgrounds, which “can enhance or ruin a good photograph.” Another practical rule: “Storytelling relies on three platforms: foreground, mid-ground and background.” And one more: “Whites are the biggest killer,” he said. Though I wasn’t sure quite what he meant by that, I was happy to be in Miami, where it never snows.
“Any questions?” he asked. Somebody wanted to know about camera settings: f-stops, shutter speeds and ISO (the setting that determines a camera’s sensitivity to light). Vineet looked disheartened. I decided it was photographic philosophy, not technology, that engaged him.
“You have to find your own settings through experimentation,” he said at last. Then, almost reluctantly, he confessed that, depending on the light, he almost set the aperture between f11 or f13 and shutter speed at 1/250th or 1/500th of a second. ISO? 800.
Using such fast shutter speeds had not occurred to me, but Vineet explained that they often eliminate, or at least reduce, the blurring that the quick camera movements of street photography often require. And in today’s cameras an ISO of 800 or even higher adds very little “noise.”
I looked around to see several of my colleagues (Vineet disciples all) adjusting the settings on their cameras. (I waited until no one was looking to tinker with mine.)
Then, after showing us examples of some of his own stunning and witty “captures,” — he’s on Instagram if you want to see them — and going over the itinerary for the next four days, he articulated a falsehood, if not an outright lie: “Remember,” he said. “This is not a competition.” Yeah, right. (Well, I must admit it turned out to be a friendly and cooperative one.)
We met the next morning at Fort Lauderdale Beach, where we were given two hours to take pictures before heading back to the History Museum for class. Adrenalin flowing, I took lots of photographs. But back at the museum, after a quick lunch and an hour spent editing our pictures — “No cropping,” Vineet commanded — we each showed our six “best” beach photos on the workshop’s large television screen. Many were excellent. Not mine. My self-grade from the day before did not change: “C.”
I vowed to do better the following day when we would meet at 9:00 a.m. in Miami’s “Little Havana.”
I got there early and fortified by strong café con leche, started shooting at Maximo Gomez Park, our designated meeting place, named after a Cuban revolutionary of the same name. The park is a gathering spot for Cubans who come there to play fiercely spirited games of dominoes in a pavilion featuring a large mural depicting presidents of every nation in the Americas, circa 1994. With the presidents looking on, the domino players made intriguing subjects: before very long, the challenge became photographing them without including one or more of Vineet’s Rangers snapping away as well.
I soon had my fill of “fishing“ and took to the streets to hunt for images that might elevate the grade I would give myself when we returned to the museum to show our best shots of the day.
Success! My “Little Havana” take got some nice comments from Vineet and my classmates, and I gave myself a B, a full grade above my day-before outing at the beach.
But on our final day of shooting, in Miami’s art district, I reverted to form, or worse: C-, giving me a solid C for the workshop.
Probably the best photograph I took on the first day of an October, 2021 two-day street photography workshop in Lambeth, London — home of the Lambeth Walk — was taken before I even got to class. When the subway stopped at Waterloo station, my stop, I noticed a young man with a bass musical instrument in an enormous white case getting up to exit. Once off the train, I followed him until I could get a clear shot of him walking through the tube station. Nothing I took that day in the workshop was as good.
I got to the workshop early that first day, which gave me time to talk to the instructor, Daniel Norwood, one-on-one. I was surprised to learn he’d been a crime scene photographer, for 12 years no less, before he’d given it up to pursue a master’s degree, to teach and to work on his own photographic projects. I asked how crime scene photography compared to street photography.
He pondered the question. “In crime scene photography,” he said finally, “we had a lot of time to cover the scene and record the necessary elements for future reference. In a sense, it’s the opposite of the quick reactions needed for street photography.” He paused again. “Crime photography had latent drama baked into every frame. Street photographers have to find the drama in other ways, and it’s a challenge because one has to see the world with fresh eyes, somehow.”
We were now joined by two of the others in the class. Both sat down, listening intently. “I’ve recently become a father,” Daniel continued, “and it’s interesting walking around with a child in tow because they notice things that a jaded adult might miss — a leaf in the shape of lips, a tarp torn in the shape of a face. This is meat and drink to the astute street photographer — to see the world with curiosity, compassion and humor and to react to it without cynicism. In a spirit of enchantment. I don’t think you can go far wrong with that approach.”
By the time he finished speaking, the four other workshoppers had joined us. It was time to start. Daniel introduced himself to the group, now seated around a large formica table. He asked each of us to give our names and say a little bit about ourselves. We turned out to be an eclectic group: a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, a student and an actor. I was the only “Yank” and the only retiree.
After the introductions, Daniel began projecting on a wall photographs by some of his favorite photographers: Robert Capa, Vivian Maier, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand, Niall McDiarmid, Marten Lange, Elliott Erwitt, and Matt Stewart. Though I’d never heard of McDiarmid, Lange or Stewart, I knew the others and felt we were in good hands with Daniel. (I later Googled the three photographers I didn’t know: McDiarmid is a London based photographer who specializes is street portraits, Lange is Swedish and photographs the natural world in black and white, and Stewart is a British street photographer. I liked the work of all three, especially Matt Stewart’s.)
After discussing the photographers we’d just seen, Daniel asked if anyone wanted to add their favorites. I offered up three pioneers of color street photography whose work I like: William Eggleston, Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter.
Then it was time to go outside. Daniel said we should stay in the neighborhood and photograph geometric patterns.
Recently I asked him by email: why did you have us photograph patterns?
“My intention was simply to break down the process into manageable stages,” he wrote back. “I know how intimidating it can be photographing people in the street, and I didn’t want to assign that right off the bat. The goal was to concentrate on inanimate objects, using light and shape as inspiration. People could be included, of course, but they weren’t essential.”
After a couple of hours shooting in the neighborhood, we reconvened and Daniel put together a slide show of the morning’s efforts. Every one of us had at least one noteworthy photograph. Looking at these variations on a theme of shapes and patterns, I realized that our differing approaches to the challenge was a learning experience in and of itself.
Day two turned out to be more ambitious, more arduous and more fun. No sooner had we congregated than Daniel asked where we wanted to go to shoot. The winning suggestion was Soho, perhaps London’s most colorful and bustling area packed with restaurants, stores, and theaters where tourists and Londoners congregate at all hours of the day.
“Shoot from the heart,” coach Daniel told us before we set off. “Look for interesting characters you would like to photograph, and if you have the nerve, ask them to pose for you. Or look for themes: windows, doorways, frames within frames, vertical lines from lampposts—themes give your pictures structure and unity. Or choose a color: red is ideal. See how many pictures you can link together using color.”
A friend surfing the internet on my behalf came up with photographer Giorgio Cossu in Naples, where lured by Pompeii (which if I had a bucket list, would have been on it), my wife and I were headed for a brief, post-pandemic vacation. Intrigued by Cossu’s website, I booked him, sight-unseen, for one of his half-day ‘”Photowalks.” The flurry of emails with Mr. Cossu that followed our Naples arrival led to his suggestion we meet at the Trieste e Trento Square.
A little nervous, as usual, I got there early.
Giorgio showed up a few minutes later, looking younger than I expected and setting me immediately at ease with a disarming smile. Knowing my interest in street photography, he suggested we go the Spanish Quarter (which takes its name from Spanish viceroys who ruled the city from 1500 to 1700).
“It’s old Naples,” Giorgio said, “no tourists.” (We were already on a first names basis.) That sounded good to me. Within a minute or two we indeed found ourselves in an area of narrow streets, hanging laundry and, to my surprise, bold and imaginative graffiti, most of it of interest and some of it artistic. Walking by colorful storefronts, I started shooting.
Giorgio led; I followed. Every once in awhile he would stop and point, and I would look where he was pointing and click the shutter. I was photographing awnings on an apartment building when he suggested I cross the street to shoot directly beneath them. Now the awnings took on a spectral quality.
“My Photowalks are 100% practice,” Giorgio would tell me when we stopped for a coffee break. “We talk about theory only by shooting in the field.” When I asked if he was a hunter or a fisherman, he smiled. Obviously he knew the distinction.
“Both,” he said. “I think you are a sniper,” he added, smiling again.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I have no patience.”
I asked Giorgio if he asked strangers’ for permission to photograph them. “Generally, yes,” he said. “First, it’s a question of respect. Then one of safety. In some instances, I shoot without asking, but it depends on the context.”
Any other advice?
“Know your camera and your lens, how they react in different circumstances. And think about editing. It’s a good exercise to try to imagine the edited image as you shoot.”
Six workshops over six decades. Am I better photographer for having taken them? Perhaps a little better, though I’m still a long way from the Saul Leiters and Ernst Haases of the world. But that’s hardly the point. You don’t have to volley like Roger Federer to enjoy tennis.
For me, photography is a way of seeing, of sharing and remembering. If the thousands of pictures I’ve taken over my lifetime have yielded few, if any, decisive moments, they have certainly rewarded me with many decisive memories. Workshops are unlikely to turn any of us into another Henri Cartier-Bresson, but they certainly can make photography, in general, and street photography, in particular, an even more fulfilling pursuit.
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