"Rich people have their own photographers."

Giacomo, bless him, wrangled a copy of the new Vivian Maier book for me, called Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits, edited by John Maloof, with an intro by Elizabeth Avedon. It arrived today. And just yesterday, a friend on Facebook (thank you, Kerry) alerted me to the work of Milton Rogovin. If you're interested in street photography, you have to see this guy. His NYT obituary is here but much more revealing is an eleven-minute Youtube that shows how he worked, who he worked with, and how he and his wife Anne were a photographic team. To the extent possible, Rogovin built relationships with the people he photographed. I watch and I love this man.

My friend Devorah makes a comparison of Maier and Rogovin: “What stood out to me was [Rogovin’s] connection to the people he photographed. That's what Vivian Maier so lacks. She stands outside, to the side... she recorded the visual beauty but not people's souls. Rogovin records people's souls. I wrote the word ‘capture’ first but realized that that is what people unfamiliar with photography fear... that photographers are capturing their souls... and in a way you are, but not in a thieving way. Rogovin’s portraits are freely given and lovingly received.”

And sure enough, here is a self-portrait of Vivian Maier, hiding her face behind a viewfinder camera in 1986 (the most recent picture I’ve seen of her). She hid so effectively that we cannot see her, and we would never have known about her but for accidents of fate.

So what is street photography? For me, for you? For people who are now dead? Is it stealth shots of slice-of-life moments? Decisive moments, a stranger leaping over a puddle, that moment and no other? Why do we make pictures of "strangers"? Is it social documentary, telling the stories of people who would otherwise be forgotten? Is it the record of a relationship between the photographer and a select group of subjects chosen for the purpose of photography or documentation? Why this character and not another?

Who owns the images? Who looks at them? Does anyone make money in this? What privilege is involved in an exchange of being, photographing, and looking? Where is the power? I have questions.

There is class in all this. Who gets pregnancy photos made of themselves by professional photographers? Who gets professionally-made photos of their children and pets? Who hires a wedding photographer and who relies on cell phones and disposable cameras? Whose lives get documented, remembered? Who makes history?

Which photographers get exhibited at the International Center for Photography and are written up in the NYT, and who dies in a bed-sit alone, surrounded by mounds of newspaper, with all her undeveloped film in a storage area she can’t afford to pay rent on? And how are lives “saved”? On Blip? On Facebook? In a phone that will eventually become obsolete? On a flash drive? In an album or a self-published printed book? In magnetic sleeves on the fridge? Why do we try to save the moments? Is it possible?

How do we use the privilege of a thousand-dollar camera and a thousand-dollar computer and a couple of hundred-and-something-dollar software programs? Why do we take these pictures of people in the street? Are we creating images as gifts, so that people who otherwise would only have blurry phone-camera images of themselves can have something a little better to save and show their children and grandchildren? Do we use them to inflate our own egos? Do we have an imaginary belt we put notches in, look how cool I am? Do we have a political purpose? I say it’s about compassion, about love, about connecting us with people who we might not otherwise see, about helping us to understand and to care more, love more. But who is served by that?

Update: Palesa got the R195 at Western Union. Hooray for that. And HRH Cinderella may be able to help me in future months, if I send her a debit card she can use and then she can transfer funds via phone. If Palesa has access to a phone with which she can get the funds, this might work.

And further: I just learned that Nelson Mandela has died. What a gift he was.