The Lost Art of Walking

8. the Walking Photograph

Garry Winogrand, walking on the crowded streets of New York in the 1970^s, carrying a Leica M4 with a 28mm lens, the leather strap wound tightly round his hand, the camera being constantly raised and lowered to and from his eye, turning his head, refocusing his gaze, looking for visual triggers, for subjects, endlessly, relentlessly pressing the shutter, shooting pictures, sometimes just shooting.

Winogrand walks, but not at the same pace as the pedestrians around him, and sometimes he stops completely so that the flow of people splits and eddies past, and sometimes he sees something on the other side of the street, and pushes through the crowd, dashes over there, dodging traffic or forcing the traffic to dodge him. Then he continues taking photographs. You’d think that New York’s angry, purposeful walkers would knock him out of the way, walk all over him; but he’s found a way to avoid that.

Sometimes he smiles and nods at the people he’s photographing, offers a word or two, chats, and in the main nobody minds. It’s a technique he’s developed, a way of presenting himself as just another eccentric on the streets of New York, crazy, self-absorbed, obsessive but essentially harmless — which is not a complete misrepresentation of Winogrand.

And then somebody perceives him as something else. A woman, irate, offended, full of righteous indignation, believes that in photographing her, Winogrand has stolen something from her. ‘Hey, you took my picture!’ she protests, and Winogrand, in his rough, tough, amused New York voice, says, ‘Honey, it’s my picture now’. It’s an old story, and another one that I very much want to be true.

♦

Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was from the Bronx. He told Tod Papageorge that when he was about ten years old he walked the streets of his neighborhood until midnight to avoid going home to the family apartment, because ‘his parents did not put a high priority on privacy’. The idea that the streets offer more privacy than the family home is one that needs no explaining.

Winogrand was a street photographer, by most reckonings the ultimate street photographer. The term is a porous one: even the most studio-bound of photographers occasionally takes a photograph on the street. And paparazzi are certainly street photographers of a sort, along with their modern mutations, the stalkerazzi and the snapperazzi — members of the public who happen to see a celeb in the street and take their picture.

You might also think it’s a term that doesn’t require much definition: if you take a photograph in the street you’re a street photographer. Well, not quite. Eddie Adams was certainly in the street in Saigon in 1968 when he photographed the Vietnamese chief of police, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, walking up to a suspected Vietcong collaborator and shooting him in the head, but he wasn’t quite a street photographer in the way that Winogrand was.

A street photographer, as we generally conceive it, is someone who finds subject matter not in exotic locales or war zones, but in quotidian settings, in public, in the city. If, in the process, he or she manages to make that setting look like an exotic locale or a war zone, then so much the better. There was a time when these photographs were often referred to as ‘candids’, but nobody seems to use that word anymore. Perhaps candidness is no longer considered something that a photograph can offer us.

All my favorite photographers are, in some sense or another, at least some of the time, street photographers: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, William Klein, Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Martin Parr, Bruce Gilden, as well as Winogrand. Some of these people view the world with a comparatively benign eye — others are downright brutal in their gaze. In either case the streets offer them the kind of subjects they’re looking for, that they and their art need.

There are ways in which street photography might seem very straightforward. There’s no need for props, lights, assistants, paid models, stylists, or any of the other detritus that some photographers carry with them. You simply go out with your camera and take pictures of what’s there. There may be some premeditation, but in the end it’s an improvised form with an unpredictable outcome, a sort of visual free jazz.

And yet a moment’s thought tells you that there’s nothing straightforward about it at all. Much of street life is actually quite banal. Even in a city as full of grotesques as New York, for every character there are thousands of ordinary Joes. People come and go rapidly, without arranging themselves into attractive or dramatic tableaux.

Conflict and awkwardness may be part of the deal — nevertheless, the best street photographers do demonstrate something that looks like ease. They’re at home in their environment, they’re able to operate confidently in public, among people. Street photographers share a space with their subjects, are on equal footing, in the same place at the same time.

What makes a great street photographer is the amount of walking he or she does. Street photographers inevitably take a lot of photographs of people walking. Just as inevitably they themselves spend a lot of time walking as they look for subjects. They are walkers who photograph other walkers.

Luck plays an enormous part in street photography, and the cliché remains true that the more work you put in, the luckier you get. There are times when Winogrand seems to have had the luck of the devil. Every time he walked down the street, dwarves, identical twins, and people cuddling monkeys would appear and pose themselves for his delight.

In 1978, Winogrand moved to Los Angeles. Some of the work he did there is wonderful. One of my favorite photographs — I have a poster of it in my office — was taken at LAX airport and shows two women in superbly stylish 1960^s dresses, heels, and hairdos, backs to the camera, walking toward the futuristic Theme Building. However, the move to L.A. coincided with Winogrand’s going shutter-crazy. In the eight or so years he was there he took more than a third of a million pictures, or at least that’s how often he pressed his camera’s shutter. But this was not picture making or photography as most of us understand it. The vast majority of the film he exposed was left unprocessed. Some rolls were developed but never printed. Even when contact sheets were made he gave them only the slightest attention, never engaging with them long enough or seriously enough to do anything resembling editing.

Some of these contact sheets have been displayed in exhibitions and published in magazines, and although no photographer should be judged by the quality of his contact sheets, it appears from these that Winogrand had not only lost his luck, he had lost his eye, too. Apparently he also lost some of his basic technical competence when it came to exposure, processing, and camera shake.

Most significant, a lot of them are taken from a moving car. Often in his L.A. period Winogrand sat in the passenger seat and was driven around the city by various friends and associates while he shot relentlessly through the windshield or the open side window. He had always done this to some extent — quite a few of the photographs of the road trip depicted in his book 1964 are taken from a car, but by no means most. Maybe he thought this modus operandi was appropriate to Los Angeles. All the same, there’s something dispiriting about it.

Of course a photographer can do whatever he wants, use any method that occurs to him, but for Winogrand this method of working seemed to mark a profound dislocation and separation. The pictures have a perfunctory, stolen look. Once he had been a fellow walker, a fellow traveler, sharing the same street, the same sidewalk, as his subjects — now he was doing drive-bys. He still photographed people, including people walking, but he also endlessly pointed his camera at parked cars, empty intersections, and blank streets.

John Szarkowski has written, ‘Many of the last frames seem to have cut themselves free from the familiar claims of art’, which is a thrillingly elegant and charitable way of saying that a lot of these photographs seem to be of nothing in particular, though not quite of nothing at all.

♦

In London I went to see Martin Parr, one of my very favorite photographers, and a man who was quick to say, ‘I’m not the biggest street photographer, you realize. The real street photographer I know is Bruce Gilden. He really does work on the streets, still, and he’s very religious about going out’.

Bruce Gilden was just a name to me at that time, although I’d seen and admired his work. And frankly Martin Parr seemed to be enough of a street photographer for most purposes. He was also the only street photographer I happened to know.

Parr made his reputation in England in the 1970^s, with photographs showing very English people doing very English things, some working class, some posh. His subjects were the English seaside, English garden parties, horse trials, empty rugby grounds, people trudging through terrible English weather.

International success has taken him around the world and broadened his subject matter — international tourism is a major interest — but the eye is much the same. A recent collection of his work is in The Phone Book, a series of close-ups of people talking on their cell phones, photographs snatched in public or on the streets, often taken just a couple of feet from the subject’s face.

We met at Martin Parr’s London office, just a stone’s throw from Bunhill Fields, Iain Sinclair’s walking ‘epicenter’. Parr accepted my basic premise that being a street photographer involves doing a lot of walking.

‘Yes. Basically you keep walking and you think, ‘God, this is boring, it’s going nowhere’, and suddenly something will happen. So really all you do is keep walking, because you know that sooner or later you’re going to get something. You become a hunter, if you like, a hunter-gatherer.

‘The thing you’ve got to remember is, most of the time there’s nothing happening and suddenly it will happen, but you can’t have the time when it happens without having all the dull time, so even though you’re not taking good pictures, you’re in the rhythm. You know, you have to take some bad pictures, because if you only saved yourself for one good one you’d never take one at all, and suddenly you’re onto something, and you might take two or three frames of the same shot’.

In fact, this describes my own experience of walking without a camera. A walk is never equally fascinating for its whole length. Certain stretches may seem dull or mundane, and then suddenly you see a number of amazing things that make it all worthwhile.

I wondered if Martin Parr had developed a sense for loitering in certain places that were likely to produce the shots he was looking for. Did he ever simply lurk rather than walk?

‘Sure. You’re looking for a place where you know things might reveal themselves, but generally on the street you don’t get much background, people take up most of the action, but I certainly know in the case of Bruce Gilden, he returns to the same place, he knows exactly where, the time of the day, the traffic flow in terms of people, and he’ll keep going back to those places. You can almost recognize people, you know. You [the photographer] become almost part of the street furniture’.

I asked what reaction he got from people he photographed on the street.

‘It varies’, he said. ‘Occasionally people say, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I’m not as aggressive as Bruce Gilden. He’s aggressive. If you appear guilty, then people are going to get cross with you. If you appear confident in what you’re doing, it helps enormously. That’s why Gilden gets away with it. He thinks it’s his absolute right to be on the street photographing, and he’s absolutely correct, of course. Therefore there is no problem, there is no issue, whereas I get people who write to me or I meet people who say, ‘How can you do that, photograph strangers walking on the street?’’

Did he ever encounter aggression?

‘Occasionally. It’s inevitable. And more and more of course these days as people know their rights and it gets more difficult to be a street photographer. It’s a dying tradition because now everyone sets everything up, and there are problems with model releases. It feels like an outdated mode. Philip-Lorca diCorcia is the last really modern street photographer, and of course he’s moved on from that as well’.

DiCorcia was the photographer who set up cinematic lighting rigs on the street, waited for people to walk into the frame where they were perfectly lit, and then pressed the shutter. He got into a whole lot of trouble for it, too. He was sued by a Jewish Orthodox priest, of eye-catching appearance, named Emo Nussenzweig, under New York’s right-to-privacy laws that forbid the use of a person’s likeness for commercial purposes without the person’s permission. The case went to the Manhattan State Supreme Court, where it came down to a definition of commerce, or more properly, of art.

Even though DiCorcia made money from the photographs, it was declared they were first and foremost art, and therefore he was protected under the First Amendment. This is something else Garry Winogrand might have said to the woman who protested his taking her picture. It’s good to know that street photography is a form of free speech, but having to go to the Manhattan Supreme Court to prove it is the kind of thing that must deter newcomers to the field.

Equally, this law may make pedestrians feel especially vulnerable. They are protected from commerce but not from art. It’s illegal for a company, or its advertising agency, to take a picture of you in the street and print it with a headline that says ‘This Man Eats Hamburgers’ or ‘This Man Needs Life Insurance’. But if there’s no headline, or if there’s a caption indicating that this is a piece of street photography taken by a serious street photographer, then you have no recourse. Personally, on balance, I think it is as it should be, but then nobody’s made a ton of money by taking my photograph while I was walking on the street.

Martin Parr and I discussed Winogrand. We talked about his taking photographs from cars, and I said that it didn’t seem quite right to me. Parr was quick to say you could take pictures any way you like — for instance, there’s a British photographer named Tom Wood who takes ‘street photographs’ of a rather special sort — the subjects are often walking in the street, but he’s on a public bus. However, Parr tended to agree there was something not quite right about Winogrand’s method.

‘That’s when he was going bonkers’, said Parr. ‘He knew he was going to die and he was shooting like there was no tomorrow, because for him there was no tomorrow’.

♦

At the time I saw Parr I’d been trying to work out who took the first photograph of somebody walking. It was a natural subject for early photographers, but at first it was an impossible one. The long exposure times required meant that only the stationary world could be recorded and celebrated.

The first photograph to show a person is thought to have been taken in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. It’s called ‘Paris Boulevard’ and it shows trees, what appears to be an empty street, and a solitary standing man. Samuel B. Morse said of it:

‘The boulevard so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages was perfectly solitary, except for an individual who was having his boots brushed’.

By ‘solitary’ he means deserted. Even though, when the picture was taken, the boulevard was full of pedestrians, they were moving too fast to be fully recorded by the camera and so simply failed to register. To be in motion was to be invisible.

♦

Even Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris, taken over fifty years later, are haunted by moving specters, blurred ghosts of walkers who pass through the scene too rapidly to be recorded.

Atget himself was a determined walker, but to appear in one of his photographs his subjects had to adopt a posed stillness.

Consequently, the works of William Fox Talbot, Matthew Brady’s Civil War pictures, and William Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan’s American West are all essentially still lifes. For his 1840 self-portrait Hippolyte Bayard found it useful to depict himself as a drowned man.

There’s a photograph by Charles Negre, dated 1852, that shows three chimney sweeps walking along a Parisian embankment. The pose looks natural enough, and was praised as such by Negre’s contemporaries, but it is a pose. There’s a hint of motion blur, but it comes about because the subjects can’t quite keep still, not because they’re actually walking.

From 1859 onward George Washington Wilson, of Aberdeen, published a series of stereographs, some of which record street scenes. There are certain technical quirks of the stereographic process that help to freeze action. It’s also a fact of photographic life that the farther the subject is from the camera, the slower the shutter speed required to freeze it. Washington Wilson’s stereographs do indeed show people walking. A typical image depicts a crowded Princes Street in Edinburgh, with many pedestrians, but they’re small and far away. You can tell that the people are really walking but you can’t tell the identity of any individual walker.

It was Eadweard Muybridge, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with his ‘motion studies’ and his battery of linked cameras, their shutters firing sequentially, who first photographed the process of human walking, although not until after he’d photographed the process of equine trotting. Muybridge had been asked by Leland Stanford to resolve the question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves ever leave the ground at the same time as they move in a fast trot. As we all now know, they do.

Muybridge began considering the matter as early as 1872, but there were gaps in his work, caused by personal crises and professional commitments. A single negative from 1877, now lost, showed Stanford’s horse Occident with all four feet off the ground, and the case was proved, but by then it was clear that Muybridge’s methodology had other uses. In fact, he had photographed people in motion from the time he started his work, but his major investigations into the ways the human body moves were started in 1882 under the patronage of the University of Philadelphia. The results were published as a book titled The Human Figure in Motion: An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Muscular Action. (I tried to consult a first edition of this book and failed — a copy is listed in the catalog of the British Library but is declared ‘missing’.) Walking was far from Muybridge’s only concern. He showed men playing tennis, baseball, and cricket, and women dancing together or helping each other bathe. But for me the walking pictures remain the most fascinating because they reveal the magical nature of something we take so much for granted. The revelation is helped along by the fact that the people in the photographs are in most cases partially undressed, and sometimes completely naked.

When I first saw Muybridge’s photographs, knowing little about their origins or purpose, I remember finding them highly charged sexually, not arousing exactly, but nevertheless fetishistic and genuinely odd. I can’t believe I’m alone in this. Muybridge’s figures exist in some strange, unspecified world, moving in front of a black background marked with a white grid. There’s obviously something of an experimental nature going on here, but it doesn’t look precisely or narrowly scientific. It looks more personal and obsessive than that.

Some of the most striking of Muybridge’s images show a naked walking man who from the neck up looks like an ancient patriarch, with wild white hair and beard. From the neck down, however, he looks like a much younger man, with a strong muscular body, and in some of the photographs he’s displaying extremely large testicles. The oblivious and irony-free Rebecca Solnit writes:

‘Halfway through his fifties, he was still straight-backed and strong, though age is apparent in the whiteness of his beard and the strained skin of his neck as he raises a tool.’

The model is Muybridge himself. Erwin Faber, who worked with Muybridge, reported that he looked so much like Santa Claus that when he went walking, children would often stop him in the street and ask for presents.

These days we’re encouraged to see Muybridge’s images as both high art and high science, and Muybridge’s own Victorian public seems to have shown few signs of being shocked or offended by them, which frankly surprises me. Muybridge’s work was available in popular as well as highly expensive limited editions, and he regularly gave public lectures in which he demonstrated his zoopraxiscope, a projector that enabled him to put the separate still images together again and create the illusion of movement.

Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope makes him, by many accounts, the father of the motion picture, and for me this was one of those fall-off-the-chair moments: the point in history at which we could take a still photograph of a man walking was essentially the same moment at which we could also take a moving picture of a man walking.

♦

I had always thought that Muybridge’s work was the inspiration for Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, but Duchamp himself rather vaguely claimed to have been inspired by the later work of Etienne-Jules Marey, a scientist first and a photographer second (the opposite of Muybridge). Marey was a physiologist, the inventor of chronophotography, who investigated the movements of birds and insects and a whole menagerie of animals before turning his attention to human locomotion. He was a contemporary of Muybridge’s and they were aware of each other, but most of his work on human locomotion came after Muybridge’s. Marey did, however, pioneer the use of ‘motion capture’ suits, with white stripes on the arms and legs to record motion, the kind of thing used today in computer animation and regarded as very high-tech.

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Incidentally, the process Muybridge used to investigate equine trotting would pretty much destroy the human sport of racewalking. Historically, walking was defined as a form of locomotion in which a part of the foot always had to be in contact with the ground, giving rise to the bizarre and faintly ludicrous gait of the serious racewalker. But modern cameras are so rigorous in their gaze, they show that the vast majority of racewalkers, even the very best of them, fail this basic test. The naked eye can’t pick up the airborne moment but a modern camera certainly can. Attempts have been made to redefine the sport in terms of what the naked eye can or can’t detect, but that’s clearly unsatisfactory. You either leave the ground or you don’t. Once technology has determined that most of a sport’s practitioners are breaking the sport’s most basic rule, things are unlikely to go well.

♦

And so I went to visit Bruce Gilden, the man Martin Parr considered the greatest pure street photographer and, as I discovered, one of New York’s fiercest walkers. He specializes in gritty, grainy, black-and-white, flash-lit grotesques, the misshapen, the troubled, and the troubling. He’s drawn to the ones with the bad skin and the bad teeth, with noses that jut and droop, mouths that hang slackly open or clench with tension or around fat cigars. He’s a fan of bad makeup, bad hair, bad wigs, of clothes that are too big or too small, out of style or were never quite in style in the first place. Sometimes his characters look terrifying — sometimes they look terrified. They may be wild-eyed or dead-eyed, obese or skeletal, mad or maddening, scarred or deformed, hyperaware or utterly oblivious. If he can get a couple of these opposing types in the same frame, that’s great, but often the frame is so tight it will only hold one person. Gilden operates at close range, Leica in one hand, flashgun in the other. There’s nothing discreet or clandestine about the process. He’s right in the faces of his subjects. They are in transit, in turmoil, and it’s only the flash and the magic of the camera that freeze and hold them still for a moment before the chaos engulfs them again. Bruce Gilden and New York were made for each other.

I met him in the offices of the Magnum photo agency in Manhattan. He was sixtyish, lean, balding, bearded, scruffy in a comfortable way, alert, intense, big-eyed, a serious man who laughs a lot. A part of Gilden conforms to everybody’s idea of what a New Yorker is or should be: motormouthed, tough, abrupt yet warm.

I tried to explain why I wanted to talk to him and gave him my spiel about street photographers having to do a lot of walking and in the process photographing a lot of walkers.

‘Sure’, he said. ‘If you don’t walk you’re not gonna get the picture’.

That might have been the end of it right there. Fortunately, Bruce Gilden is a man who likes to talk.

‘My style’, he said, ‘is very predatory, like Moriyama had a book called The Hunter years ago and I was always intrigued by the title. When I started, I liked these social-documentary-type photographs. Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson. I like the street. I like being around people. Well, I do and I don’t, OK.

‘Anyway, when I started I went to Coney Island and did work on Coney Island, because for me I don’t like to talk to people, I mean I will if I have to in the street, but I’m basically shy and also I have a fear factor. I’m a physical guy, I’m quick-tempered, so what that means is that I’m afraid of violence but also I’m violent. I have a very good sense of where danger is, who can be dangerous, I’m streetwise, OK, so having said that, you know when you put your camera up and put it in someone’s face and you come from a background like mine there could be fire, you know, it could be quite bad, so I’ve learned to have a very good bedside manner.

‘In the early days I went to Coney Island because it’s a meeting area, there were people there, interesting kinds of people. You didn’t have to ask to photograph people. You could ask if you wanted to but you’re in a freak zone, so why ask?

‘The pictures I took were quite traditional, documentary pictures. Cartier-Bresson was an influence — well, I shouldn’t say that. I liked his pictures OK, and I was able to do that type of picture, but then I said, ‘Wait a second, who could do Cartier-Bresson better than Cartier-Bresson? Why would I want to be a little Bresson? What could I add to it?’ So it evolved. I liked film noir. My influence is black-and-white television, and my father. My father was a film-noir character — he was about five foot seven, two hundred twenty pounds, gray hair, pinkie ring, smoked cigars, racketeer-looking. I idolized him when I was five years old. He was everything. He was the fireman, he was George Washington, you name it, it was him’.

Had he ever photographed his father?

‘No, because I don’t photograph people I know, maybe because I am very ironic and very satirical and sarcastic, so I don’t. People have said in the past, and in the present also, but it has been said that what Bruce does is really easy, he photographs characters. No. It’s not easy’.

And why so confrontational, so in your face?

‘I don’t want to be accused of sneaking something. ‘Hey you, are you taking a picture of me? What are you? A sneak?’ But sometimes I’m so close that people think, ‘Oh yeah, he took a picture of something back there behind me because he can’t be that close’. But when you use the flash people know you took a picture. You can’t say, ‘I didn’t take a picture’. So I’m quite honest usually unless there’s really a lot of danger.

‘Since I’m quite an emotional type of guy, a physical type of guy, was a good athlete, and I like to be close to people ‘cause I want to take their guts out, it evolved that I would get very close and use a flash.

‘I used to have a schedule. No longer. I used to try to go out every day. Now I haven’t been out for two months. I had jobs, my daughter was playing soccer in England, but generally I would go out about two, two-thirty in the afternoon and stay out till it gets almost dark, but the problem here for me is that I’ve been on the street so long, you know, I’m trotting over the same ground. And there aren’t so many characters as there used to be, so you know the city is shifting, I’m getting older, things are changing, the world is smaller’.

I’d heard that he had certain set daily routes that he’d walk constantly while looking for people to photograph.

‘Sure. I’d go on Fifth Avenue from like Forty-ninth Street to Fifty-seventh, up and down, up and down, up and down, one side of the street, too, not the other, the west side. It’s quite funny, you know. And Broadway between Forty-third and Forty-seventh, the west side, it’ll be darker on that side of the street.

‘I used to work Forty-second Street when it was a little bit of a hovel, but you had to be careful there, people really didn’t want to be photographed. When I photographed there in the mid-eighties you had these young kids pickpocketing people, black kids, and one day, you know, I had my camera and they gave me a little shit, they were maybe thirteen but they weren’t little, and I said to the guy, ‘Listen, if you don’t like it let’s go round the corner’. That’s the way I felt, OK, so we became friendly, OK, then about five, six years later I’m on the train, I must have been living in Brooklyn Heights, and I saw the kid. I didn’t know him but I said, ‘Hi, how you been?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve been in prison, you know’. These were no good, these kids, so their whole life would be in and out of prison, so we talked a little bit and…’

So, I said, inviting him round the corner for a fight was enough to make a friend for life.

‘Of course, because if they respect you they’re fine. If they don’t respect you they’ll shit all over you. A cop once said to me, ‘What the fuck are you doing taking these pictures?’ And I’m an anti-police guy. He said, ‘If you took a picture of my wife and me walking on the street like that, I’d knock you out’.

‘I said, ‘You could try’. Who was he to talk to me that way, you know? So we became friends. It’s all about respect. If they respect you, it’s fine. If they don’t, then you have a problem.

‘And, you know, I’m not the toughest guy in the world, but I’ll stand up for my rights, within reason, though there are times when you have to put your tail between your legs and not take that picture.

‘And if you’re walking a lot, you can’t walk as well when you get older, you don’t react as fast and even some things mentally go through my head, like I’ll say why should I slam the camera in that eighty-year-old’s face, you know?

‘Whereas before I’d only be deterred by the fear factor — the fear factor would say, ‘You’re going to get your ass kicked’. You know, I’ve challenged people in the street. I can be quite ferocious but I’m also not stupid.

‘I walk hard in the streets, OK. Even when I’m not taking pictures. I was coming out of the subway the other day and I know when people are jerking with me, and there was this black guy, about thirty-five, solid, and he was going to get me, you know, I saw it, so I armed him, you know, with my elbow and he looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘Well, you know, I didn’t hear you say excuse me’, and I guess he knew that I wasn’t just going to roll over, so he kept going. But you have to walk hard and if you walk hard and look people in the eye and I’m quite aggressive, I really don’t want to fight because I already lost one camera in a fight and I lost the lens, too, so it was an expensive day for me.

‘But if you walk hard here and you’re smart, then people don’t think you’re weak. See, I find that if I’m strong and I tell people, ‘If you don’t like it, call a cop’, it discourages a lot of people. Once you show weakness, weak people take over. I want this and I want that and you’re not going anywhere, and then it’ll lead to more things and they’ll start touching you, start grabbing your arm, ‘Oh, I want the film’. So I think my mantra is I deal with it all the same way and the same attitude, that’s it, I don’t make an exception unless there are six guys, then I make an exception, you know, when I’m caught, then I try to look for the nearest exit. I never run. I walk. If you run, then you look like you’re in the wrong.

‘I’m very smart in the street, very streetwise. And I’ll be the first person to give someone a hand. There was a lady a few years ago and a black kid was annoying her. I went over to the lady, she was crying, so I said, ‘Don’t worry’, took the kid, and I threw him into these bushes. I can be kind but I can also be nasty. So…I’m a good friend, I’m not a good enemy’.

This sounded to me like the authentic voice of the New York walker. I thought it might be fun to be Bruce Gilden’s friend but not easy. When I left him I felt invigorated. There was something exciting in the way he described walking in New York as a risky activity, a form of combat, a struggle for dominance, sometimes a contact sport. I thought there was something very familiar and accurate about it, too. New York is a city where the people not only enjoy getting in your way as you’re walking down the street, they’ll actually go out of their way to obstruct your progress. They’ll inconvenience themselves for the greater pleasure of inconveniencing you.

But there’s a certain kind of hard walker, or perhaps a certain kind of crazy bastard, that people, even on the streets of New York, do leave room for. He looks madder and more determined than most, with a walking style that says ‘Get out of my way’, and most people do, because it’s also saying more than that. It’s saying ‘Get the fuck out of my way, get the fuck out of my face’. It’s saying ‘Fuck you. And if you’ve got a problem with that, then OK, let’s take it round the corner’. If you’re looking for an argument when you’re walking in New York, you can find one on every block.

As I walked away from the Magnum offices I started to move really fast and hard, my idea of the way Bruce Gilden walked, determined, fierce, kind of angry. It was only an act, only a pose that I was trying on for size, but I was serious about it, in some way I meant it, and it worked. It was strange and oddly gratifying because people really did start to move aside for me, to get out of my way. I don’t know if they really thought I was a madman looking for trouble, but they were taking no chances and I didn’t blame them. On most days I’d have done exactly the same. Most days you steer clear — you look at this poor bastard and see what New York has done to him, turned him into a furious walking monster. You have pity and contempt, a certain amount of fear, and maybe just a little sympathy. And then on other days you realize that the furious walking monster is you. What happens when you meet another of your own sort, when a Bruce Gilden walks into another Bruce Gilden, doesn’t bear thinking about. You probably wouldn’t want to be standing in the street next to it, but it’d be really interesting to see a photograph of it.