Voyeuristic Street Photography

I must admit that this intrigues me, and has for some time.  I have always been something of an eavesdropper, and find myself listening to and watching other people’s interactions very intently.  A few years ago I made some furtive audio recordings of conversations held by total strangers in various public places.  I had planned to use these recordings in some sound collage, and indeed did use one recording in particular.  I quickly gave up the practice however.

Nowadays, I find myself occasionally taking random photographs of total strangers going about their lives in public places.  The iPod Touch, which is basically the iPhone without the “phone” part, makes this practice very easy!  The concept of capturing people exactly as they are, and without the falsity that arises with the awareness of being photographed, is currently very personally fascinating.

I also like the idea of creating ” time capsules” of a sort.  Ten years from now, a random image of people milling about on the street will portray that time and place accurately.  Whereas, trying to recreate the past retroactively can never be done flawlessly.  “Now” will always work its way into the representation of “then”.

While I am too much of a coward to really do anything  with my small collection of voyeuristic street photography, I have collected some from Flickr to share in this post.  Perhaps later, if I can amass a large enough collection, I will form a group of some sort through this blog.  It would be interesting to celebrate the surreptitious street photo with like minded others.

Anyway, here is a collection of my personal favorite voyeuristic street photography, found on Flickr: