Who makes the photo, the subject or the photographer?

Of course it’s the photographer. I’m speaking somewhat metaphorically. Take a look at this photo:

Rather striking, dramatic, no? That’s a photo where the subject makes the shot. What do we have? A well-known skyline, Lower Manhattan, an iconic building, One World Center, and dramatic light, what photographers call the Golden Hour. A trained monkey standing where I stood could have gotten that shot.

This shot’s a bit different.

It’s still dramatic, with strong geometry converging toward the center and some dramatic light. But the subject is quite ordinary, a bar at a standard-issue middle-tier restaurant. It takes a photographer to see that as a proper subject for a photography.

And then we have this:

WTF? What’s in the center of the shot, where the subject should be? There’s a doorway with “Soulcycle” above it and a clock above that. If that’s the subject, then why’s it obscured by that tree right of center, the pole to the left, and the car in front? Why? Because I took that photo and that’s what I wanted. It’s not a mistake. It’s intention. It makes you aware of the space between you and the ostensible subject.

Here’s a similar shot:

If you look closely at the enter you’ll see an iconic building, the Empire State Building, no less, the best-known building in New York City. But it’s got all those trees in front of it, and then there’s the hedge in the foreground, and the people. All intended. Not, mind you that I posed anything. I’m basically a street photographer, I walk around and shoot what I see, though on occasion I may take some pains to stand in just the right place.

Finally, this shot, one of my oldest:

It’s from the summer of 2004. I was scheduled to deliver a speech at a conference in Chicago when I saw, in The New York Times, that Millennium Park had just opened. I decided that I needed some photos of it for a project I was working on at the time: World Island, “for a world that’s permanently fair”. So I bought a cheap point-and-shoot camera, a Canon Powershot, and took a bunch of photos. That’s one of them.

What’s the subject? Well, if you look to the center there’s not much of anything there, just some people milling around on the plaza, which is in the park. You’ve probably looked at the lower left where you see a photographer photographing something off to the right, that silver thing, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor. There’s a spindly little tree at the right and a bunch of buildings in the background. That center space is surrounded, which is the point. After I’d taken that photo and had a chance to think about it, I decided that THAT’s what I’m about as a photographer, space, space and light.

That’s what those photos are about.