Blog Post: Tony Ruiz

A woman is standing behind her daughter, placing a hat on the girl’s head while trying earnestly to fit her hair in without disturbing her ponytails. The girl is resistant. Her face says, “I don’t want to wear a hat,” but her mother just laughs. Her younger brother points and giggles, an act his mother acknowledges, as if, together, they had plotted this very moment at which to incite the young girl to a tantrum with a simple request to wear a hat. The father stood, turned away, talking on his cell phone.

I imagined a photo: The four of them in frame, the father in the foreground, to the left his son, to the left the mother and daughter. Of all the possible things they could have done, places they could have chosen to stand, there they were outside of a neutrally painted barbershop, in partial shade, wearing Cuban paraphernalia just purchased at the Calle Ocho Festival, their bodies so picturesquely placed with relation to one another, their actions so uniquely their own, so descriptive, so temporary.

Temporary.

“It’s for a school project,” I had to explain to camera-shy subjects. Inquisitive subjects ruined a number of possibly brilliant shots. Unearthing the latent potential of a scene takes finesse. More importantly, it takes time.

In a split second, the little boy stopped laughing. He stared at me, and his sister retreated behind her mother. I had not gotten a chance to take a photo yet. I had stealthily but swiftly moved into the perfect spot and was finalizing the camera settings when the scene disappeared. The magic was gone.

“Why are you taking a picture?” Asked the mother. The father had moved away from his family and me in order to continue his phone call.

The mother offered to pose for the shot. But when I took the photo, she was staring at the hat, her daughter was staring at me, and the son cowered behind his father’s knees just when the setup was suggested.

While trying to capture an image that conveys a particular feeling, the subject’s knowledge of the photo proves to be a significant obstacle. In my experience, subjects did not know how to “look natural,” even upon my request. The immediate reaction of these subjects was to smile and look at the camera. When I told them the look was still not natural, they tended to smile and look away from the camera, instead.

I realized early on in my photo project that requesting subjects to “look natural” was futile. This is not only because they simply did not know how to “look natural.” This is because the photograph, itself, is not natural. No matter how hard a subject may try to ignore the camera’s presence, the knowledge of being seen and recorded has an automatic influence on the subjects’ behavior. Subject bias is the culprit, and there is nothing natural about the conflict between the subject’s interests and the photographer’s.

I wanted to capture the dysfunctional dynamics of this family standing outside of the barbershop at the hectic Calle Ocho Festival. The mother, however, wanted me to capture her flawless family sharing a Sunday afternoon together. The result was neither.

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