Should I Shoot that guy?

My wife had noticed a man following us about 25 feet back. He seemed nice enough and was wearing a suit jacket, occasionally he spoke into a radio. We asked our guide who he was; he said a policeman who was a friend of his, hired to watch our backs for pickpockets and keep the more aggressive street vendors from swarming us.

In addition to our guide, and the rear-guard, there was another man whose sole job seemed to be watching me and my photo selection. I had taken a photo of a woman, most likely Muslim, sitting in the street selling vegetables and apparently this was not a good thing. We were in Tetouan, at the Souk or Sunday market, in Morocco.

The tiny alleys were impossibly narrow and dark and I imagined that if we had no escort this whole thing might go quite differently. At one point I went to take a picture of a man in a shoe repair/ cobbler type of store which appeared to have been inherited from his great grandfather. It was a crevice maybe six feet wide and filled with old leather and tools with the man’s lined face barely visible in back, this was the scene I came so far for. He saw me photographing him however, and making an angry noise, he came after me!

Should I shoot that shot? Sometimes I wonder. Am I being rude, am I intruding, do I have any rights in this photographic interlude that I travelled so far and paid so much money to achieve?
Ethics in photography gets a lot of play now in terms of talking about digital manipulation of images, what is real and what is photo-shopped fake? Also talk of “staged” news story images, and the meanings and context possibly being changed, are debated. Nature photography is concerned with disturbing animals that may be endangered. Here however, I am speaking of taking pictures of people, in their natural surroundings, for my own pleasure and use while traveling.

I wouldn’t mind asking for a release or even paying for a shot of people on a foreign street or going to Sunday market in Morocco but it just takes so much time. After a tedious negotiation I am usually rewarded with a posed “touristy” picture that I wanted to avoid in the first place. For me the ideal is to photograph people in their natural surroundings living life undisturbed and unaware, therein lies the problem. If they knew they were being photographed would they object? If they don’t know and they are not interfered with, is it OK? I mean no harm and simply want to capture my wonderful adventure to share with friends and family for the most part. So do I have that right?

Oftentimes, in situations where I want to be incognito, I will use the flip-out 360 degree LCD screen to make it appear I am doing, or looking at, something else other than my subject. Also, sometimes with a smaller camera I might set the timer and put the camera on a table out of the way and out of mind, to capture an image. When the camera is up to my face and aimed right at someone, it can be quite intimidating. People certainly wonder; what is he doing, what does he want with me? This is true whether in Seattle or across the world.

Each situation is different and some are hard to decipher. My personal guide tried to steer me by saying “ah… this is a nice picture”, and pointing, he thought helpfully, at one of his standard kitsch scenes. I tried to be nice and show interest and occasionally snapped the shutter.

In this way we seemed to balance in a ying-yang of privacy and perceived decorum against my eye’s hunger for the exotic and spicy marketplace images I wanted to burn in my memory, for the rest of my life.