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In my last ‘Street Photograph of the Day’ I talked a bit about including advertisements in street photography, specifically how difficult it is. So when I went out to shoot the other day, and came across these garish Beyoncé H&M advertisements, I knew I wanted to create a follow-up post.

Typically, I am not the type of photographer who can stand in one place and shoot frame after frame trying to get a single image. I tend to want to go to where the action is, punching toward it, always moving in and at my subject. But this day, my swagger wasn't so good, so I decided to hang back and let the tide of rush hour sweep through the frame.

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I think including advertisements in street photography is one of the hardest things to do well in the genre. No doubt, advertisements are large part of urban life. They are everywhere. In the large urban metropolises, advertisements cover much of the external environment and empty space. In New York, graffiti on subway trains – by poor and middle-class kids in the Bronx and boroughs – has been replaced by full – train advertisements for the new Microsoft Windows and Target.

Most street photographs that include advertisements use them in one of two ways either as graphic backdrops or kitschy contrasts/juxtaposition of a subject (A “ha ha one line joke”, if you will). Not many of these photographs get at the psychological and emotional impact that these advertisements play in urban life. When I saw this “healthcare” truck, with its strange advertisement – the figures in on relationship to one another and with disjointed expression, the panels subdividing the faces of the children – I knew I had to include it in a photograph. I kept shooting as crowds of people walked in front, shooting frame after frame at about chest height, but none of the photos with the exception of this one had any mystery to it.

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I think most photographers are guilty of trying to bring balance to chaos, order to disharmony. It is a long-standing photographic trope that an image and must be ‘well composed’ and the edges of each individual element must be independent and separated from the elements behind it. I guess, this leads itself to a type of clarity and makes the image easier to view – perhaps this is the difference between a snapshot of an image and one that has been thought through. Sometimes it seems like these harmonious images actually do a disservice to the reality that they intend to represent. Occasionally if you're lucky you can take a photo of a disorganized mess of an event, in a jarring slightly offkilter way – with tangencies, overlaps that don't quite seem right, and skewed horizontal and vertical lines – that better represents the moment than any organized frame could.

This is what happened here. I was shooting through a crowd of people crossing and overlapping in all different directions, coming at diagonals and crisscrossing and there was a kind of vibrating tension in the air. Off to my right there was a nasty cackling noise and two women moved into the frame with a kind of undulating rhythm, laughing nastily. I don't know if it works as a harmonious image but it sure makes me feel tense when I look at it.

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I have written about it before, but you have to be careful about taking photos of children that you do not know. As nonsensical and media driven as the fear might be – people are very sensitive to strangers taking photos of children. That said some of the best photos ever taken were of children.

I have traveled around the world quite a bit, and most places that I have gone, especially out of the United States, there is not such a culture of paranoia and fear of people taking photos in general, but especially of kids. When shooting photos of people, it is important to try and be as inconspicuous as possible, but also you must ‘own the role’. Do not hide what you are doing.

Just as you have every right to take almost any picture that you want, people also have the right to ask questions about what it is you are doing. I always carry around a 4 x 6 book of my photographs. That way if anyone gets upset, I can flip out the book immediately and show them what it is I do. I tell them that I will gladly send them a print if they like. That said, I don't suffer assholes and if someone is good to be a jerk to me…

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Sometimes you see a detail or a piece of something that attracts you and you take a photo of it, or at least try to. Usually these types of “grab shots” do not work, as the photo is not about an idea or relationship but rather a single element that attracted your eye. Other times you see the photo as a whole, and you already know where you were going to put the frame, and for the most part how the different elements are going to interact, so you are just waiting for the moment. In the end, you never know what you have, until you look at the photo a few days after – and in both types of photos it is the unpredictable elements (that you were reacting to subconsciously or intuitively) that make or break it.

This image I saw immediately as a whole. I was on the corner, off to the side, facing the wrong direction and I saw these three women with the central woman holding a bouquet of flowers. I knew I wanted the bouquet to divide part of the frame so I circled around, positioned myself, and snapped the photo when she gestured her chin out like that. I knew I had a decent one, but it is the elements in the background that are aligned – that is what makes this photo work.

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Street Photography Workshops, Gear Reviews, Commentary, Tips and Tricks @ jonathanauch.com