Shot from the hip
Native New Yorker Bruce Gilden is unapologetic about his in-your-face approach to street photography. He tells Diane Smyth why he's getting closer still
© Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos
Ducking into position like a boxer, he delivers an uppercut of a shot - a full-frontal assault with his camera and flash firing just inches from his prey, who just a split-second ago was happily minding his own business walking down one of Manhattan's major boulevards. The subject, a smartly-dressed man in his sixties, stops and grins. 'It's perfect - I wanted to shoot,' shouts the photographer in the kind of Brooklyn drawl you rarely hear in New York these days, before commanding, 'But don't smile! Walk, walk - it's good.
Bruce Gilden is best known for his uncompromising, in-your-face approach to street photography (you can see the scene above and others of him in action on the streets of New York in a You Tube video that's received nearly half a million hits at bit.ly/IA7LH), so you might be surprised to learn he's a former sociology student. But it's all there in the pictures. 'My work is about the condition of society,' he says. 'What it does to the people in the pictures.'
But if he's interested in society at large, he's also fascinated in eccentrics. 'Ever since I was a child I've liked characters on the street,' he says. 'And I've seen some characters. As a child I used to look out of the second-storey window to a major street in Brooklyn. The raw energy was incredible.'
'In Facing New York Gilden has captured the uniquely individualistic, self-styled New York personality in broad and simple terms and with great expressive authority,' writes his agency, Magnum Photos, on his 1992 book. 'Better than any orchestrated set piece, this book has the elements that illustrate how New York is such a haven for the uncommon and the unconventional.'
Comedy of manners
Born in 1946, Gilden was inspired to become a photographer by Michaelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup, which he saw in 1968 while studying sociology at Penn State. He got a camera, enrolled in evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and was soon shooting on the streets. Or actually, the beach - his first major project was on Coney Island, New York's infamous resort. 'I don't know what the definition of street photography is, but for me that was where it all started,' he says. 'I narrow it (street photography) down to people who hunt people.'
By 1981 he really was on the New York streets, and he's continued to shoot them ever since, as well as capturing New Orleans' Mardi Gras street festival, voodoo rites in Port-au-Prince Haiti in the mid-1980s, Japan's little known Yakuza underworld and rural Irish horseracing fans. He joined Magnum in 1998, and became a full member in 2002.
He has, as the agency puts it, 'established an expressive and theatrical style that presented the world as a vast comedy of manners', but this style didn't arrive fully formed. He started out shooting with available light, for example, but later adopted a flash to 'visualise the anxiety, the stress and the energy of the streets'. Now he's so used to putting the flash in his left hand and the camera in his right that they feel like natural extensions of his body, he says. Other things have stayed the same throughout his work though - he still shoots on film, for example, and he shoots in black-and-white. 'I see in black-and-white, absolutely, although colour is more real. I like to be abstract because my photography is so real.'
He also shoots with a 28mm lens, darting right in front of people to photograph them (and even remonstrating with them if they smile). It's a fairly abrasive approach but he says it's essential, and less offensive than you might expect. 'The older I get, the closer I get,' he says. 'I want to get as much as I can of the person - I want to get their souls. I also think that putting the viewer right in the picture makes them feel more involved.
'Sometimes I'm so close people don't realise I'm photographing them,' he adds. 'They think I'm photographing something just behind. And I've had a pretty good success rate of people not getting mad because I have a good demeanor. If I used a telephoto I think they'd be more annoyed, because that's stealing. I don't want to be accused of doing anything sneaky. But everything I do, I do with stealth in mind. I have to - if you do it with stealth, you get peoples' undistorted faces.'
If one of his subjects seriously objects Gilden won't use the image but, on the whole, he robustly defends photographers' right to shoot in public. He doesn't care how a photograph is made as long as it's a good, he says, and he adds that he feels perfectly at liberty to photograph what he wants. 'Who is someone else to tell me how to work?' he asks. 'I don't tell them.'
And, as he points out, in New York at least he's backed up by legal precedent - when Phillip Lorca di Corcia was taken to court by a man Jew who objected to the commercial use of his image, di Corcia won. 'If you can win that case you can win anything,' says Gilden. 'Very positive. The ethics of street photography is a tired debate. I've noticed nobody ever questioned me jumping in front of someone in Haiti. Aren't people in Haiti just as human as people in New York?'
In fact, he says working in Haiti was just as easy - in fact easier - than shooting in New York, despite its reputation for violence, because the locals were enthusiastic, the streets were quiet and the light was good. 'What I did in Haiti in nine weeks would have taken me 10 years to do in New York,' he laughs.
He found shooting in Japan relatively easy too, even when he was dealing hard-bitten Yakusa gangsters. Shooting in New York has got harder, he says, but not because people have got more suspicious - because they've got less interesting.
'New York is different now, people are inside with the air conditioning on watching TV,' he says. 'And people aren't as interesting now - the world is smaller and Gap and Starbucks are everywhere. And everyone is playing with little machines so they walk at a different pace - in a catatonic fashion. I'm a speedy kind of guy, so that's unnatural to me.'
Speed is of the essence in his work though - New Yorkers may be walking more slowly than before, but he still only gets one shot per subject. And he's never fully in control of his images, he says, because that's the nature of street photography.
'It's not an exact science,' he admits. 'Often I see a person or a situation that's interesting and by the time I get there things have changed. And even if I get there, just because you have a good subject doesn't make it a good picture. It has to work as a picture.'
At the same time, his work isn't down to chance either. He knows now when a photograph has little chance of working, and, conversely, when he's got 'into a flow' - he shot two of his favourite images just a couple of frames apart. Even still, his success rate is low, and he claims he's only taken 30 great pictures over the last 30 years. He's got, as this figure suggests, pretty high standards. 'I want to shoot pictures that work on a deeper level than usual photojournalism,' he says.
'My pictures are like symbols of what I see, little stories. You have to use your imagination and find the story. For example, years ago I shot a guy in Haiti with a shadow falling across one eye. He looked like a prisoner - at a time when Haiti was all revolution and lots of people were prisoners.'
And in that sense, he adds, he isn't photographing other people at all. He's actually using them as characters, symbols for the idea he's trying to illustrate. 'It's my movie, and I'm the director,' he says. 'That's why I don't especially like it when people smile. It's my movie and I don't look at life that way.'
Online: More of Bruce Gilden's work can be viewed at magnumphotos.com.
