A young girl looks down at the camera before exposing the photographer below. (Photos by Will Parson/Guardian)
There are certain situations that a photographer knows are
risky. Shooting grizzly bears or documenting street-gang warfare, for example,
have their obvious hazards. But there is a subject that poses threats to the
photographer that even he cannot see sharply through the lens. A child can seem
innocent enough, and could even make for some of the best pictures, but often
lurking beyond the crop of a zoom lens is an overprotective parent, ready to
pounce.
You never know when allegations of pedophilia are going to
get thrown around. I’m sure it’s a rare occurrence, but with digital
photography and the Internet allowing anyone access to millions of images,
parents have more reasons to be concerned than ever. Not only do they have to
look out for perverts, but anyone with a camera is a threat unless the parent
knows the pictures are going to be responsibly handled. Even other parents are
suspect; a father with a camera at the park might make it well known that he
only intends to photograph his own child.
I don’t normally photograph a lot of children, but La Jolla
is one of my favorite places to walk around with my camera when I’m short on
creativity. On any given day, it’s full
of parents and their children. And with the future of Children’s Pool and its
resident harbor seals a controversial issue right now, I’ve been tempted by the
locale’s news value to document how people use the area. And it happens that
children, so easily excited by this pack of sleepy marine mammals, provide some
of the most interesting visual reactions to their environment.
Granted, the intensity of parents’ suspicions I’ve
encountered is often far from the level directed toward sexual deviants, but
I’ve still adopted several techniques to help me avoid trouble. First of all, I
think what helps most is that I don’t look like a child molester. I look like a
college kid, and sometimes I wear a UCSD shirt to emphasize this. An additional
trick I employ is to act as if a child is just so adorable that his parent
should be proud that I’m taking his picture. Never mind what it’s for — they
can just think about the great genes they passed to their offspring, and I can
move on to another subject. A related trick is to act like the picture is being
taken on a whim, because the child is doing something funny and particularly
noteworthy; the chances are good that the parents think their child is
noteworthy as well. It helps to laugh in this type of situation. Sometimes,
though, there is no time for disguises and the best method is to be
transparent. Sometimes I’ve crouched down right at the parents’ feet to take a
picture of their child.
More often, though, I try to take the picture and move on
before anyone realizes what I’m doing. It also certainly helps to disguise the
fact that I’ve been watching people for several minutes, waiting for the right
moment. This is a technique I use with subjects of all ages. It’s worth the
time I would otherwise have to spend explaining what I’m doing — time spent not
taking photos. It has failed, though, as it did recently when I found a young
girl watching the seals at Children’s Pool. She was some distance away from her
mother, and when she saw me take a picture she sounded the alarm: “Mommy, he
took my picture!”
My heart pounded away the seconds between the girl revealing
my covert shooting and her mother finally smiling at me in acceptance. I smiled
and waved before I quickly shuffled off in the opposite direction. Until the
day I head into the wilderness to shoot a roaring grizzly bear, I’ll wonder if
taking pictures of children can be anymore nerve-wracking.
