We just need to stop to celebrate photographers like Bruce Gilden
My opinion on Bruce Gilden
As a street photographer I think to have the right to express my opinion about a photographer that reflects certain attitudes on the street making photos to strangers.
Bruce Gilden in action: harassing an old lady
I only appreciate the first Gilden, the one in Coney Island. For the rest: the use of the flash in the street as he did (used to do) is repetitive and always becomes the same photo: in practice it builds a moment that isn't there, it's the reaction to the flash being shot in the face, the terrified look of the subject and very little else. In all these years with the flash in the street other contemporary photographers who aren't so well known have done better, much better.
A precursor? Actually not even that, since the thing is borrowed first from Weegee and then, above all, from Mark Cohen, who at least has a much more personal and artistic style. For the rest, in the famous video on YouTube we see him clashing by raising a hand against a woman. As a person he acts like a neighborhood bully, telling the nonsense about his father being "like a gangster" every time, like a gangster who can mean everything and nothing. But saying that and that his mother was a prostitute makes you sound like a damned artist and gives depth to a work that in reality doesn't have any.
While the work on Haiti is a good work, I don't like the series of portraits aimed at making people ugly and sensationalizing mental illness and drug addiction problems at all. Gilden is someone who asks for medical certificates in a country (Mexico) that is not his, who goes around escorted by bodyguards to go take pictures, thus showing that he is not the tough guy he always brags about. In a recent conference he called the film Blow Up and Michelangelo Antonioni himself overrated. And now he lets us know that in a year he will be bankrupt. Maybe proposing that NFT was not a good idea? Or it was already a sign of desperation? Because now all we know that the NFT thing is a fraud.
As a street photographer I have fought and will always fight this idea that a photographer must act as a sort of bully. I don't even accept the argument of a life of suffering, because it doesn't seem right to me that you take your life of suffering out on others by scaring them with the flash. Which in most cases photographs old ladies and fairly defenseless subjects. He should come and do it here, like in Cuautepec, in the barrios where I live and where they shoot at policemen at 11 in the morning, and where I go to photograph, without a bodyguard as Gilden is used to and then we'll talk about it again. Son of a gangster... please!
Seriously, guys: we should stop to celebrate certain photographers. That is not the way to act on the street. Respect should be the first thing, even more when you are photographing without asking permission before to shoot. You know, I consider perfectly fair to do that, but exactly for this reason we should be careful and more sensitive. Street Photography needs to be candid but we can’t think to scare people, interrupting their path, raising a hand against a woman and the fact that her reaction was also angry is not a justification: you can’t think to engage a fight on the street.
Another thing: it's time to stop giving weight to certain narratives that the photographer himself builds to give more depth to his work or to give himself the air of a cursed artist or a tough guy. Based on that he built a career, because there are so many photographers much more valid than him even if not above all from the point of view of what a photographic work communicates. I don't see in him a very refined research and background, on the contrary, he is really quite crude and superficial. Photographs, I am convinced, must speak for themselves and it will not be a purposely created biography that will confer street credibility in my eyes.
