raleighnet.org

For a while there I was routinely visiting the photo blog of Marc North. He’s been experimenting with taking photographs of strangers in public places. He talks about struggling to get past the taboo of photographing these strangers.

I understand completely what he means. In my own experience with hobbiest, weekend shooting, I’ve found it to be almost impossible to bring myself to intrude into a random strangers space with a camera. I find I can only really bring myself to observe if I myself am not observed. Distance helps, surreptitiousness helps, but you can’t get the really good shots that way. I’ve let more than one really, really good shot slip away. There is a disturbing parallel with flirting in this that I will leave unexplored for now.

By placing himself within their lives, Marc is able to get some nice, humanizing shots. David Crawford has gone even further. By introducing stop motion, he’s able to capture even more of their humanity. As he says:

It is said that 90% of human communication is non-verbal. In these photographs, the body language of the subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of Web-based animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage.

By isolating these random movements, he does seem to have captured some essence of a human experience. Number 1 doesn’t seem to really work for me, so you may want to start with one of the other numbers then hit 1 after you understand better what he’s trying to do. [Thank you, thank you, thank you metafilter]