We want to see faces. Humans connect with each other through the eyes—we can try to understand what someone else is experiencing based on their facial expression. This is why moving around to show your subject’s face in photographs is important. Not every situation calls for a full frontal, but it’s nice to see something, a hint or a suggestion, of emotion in our subjects. It’s not always easy to move around in certain situations. You’re movement can be physically limited or you might feel uncomfortable positioning your camera directly in front of someone and hope that they won’t look at you. Tact and courtesy go a long way in these situations, but sometimes you have to push the boundaries. Often I find that the imaginary “do not cross” line is just that—imaginary.
We did a story on prison work crews out of the Shutter Creek Correctional Institution. Whenever we photograph these guys working in the community, we’re instructed not to talk to the inmates or ask for names. Sometimes we’re instructed not to show their faces. So when I had the opportunity to photograph the crews returning to prison after a days work, I wasn’t sure what kind of “boundaries” the prison admin would impose on my access. When I got the nod to get close to the inmate search, a corrections officer began yelling at me to not take his picture because I, “didn’t want that kind of trouble.” It’s easy to retreat when an authoritative person is yelling at you to put the camera away, but I had the access and wasn’t going to let one self-conscious C.O. ruin this moment. I knew that photographing this search from behind the inmates would limit the potential points of interest in the final image. I took the grumpy C.O.’s comments in stride and moved around so that I could see the inmates faces while being searched. Once I composed the image, I waited for the other corrections officers’ body movements to come together to form a moment that reveals the search experience for both the inmates and the officers.
World Photo by Benjamin Brayfield
