There are already so many should and should nots out there – why add anything more to this pressure? Too many people are beating themselves up over what they think is right or not right. So, the following rule(s) is for me; please, it need not be for you:

Many moons ago, when I was still teaching basic photography courses at universities, it would sometimes become necessary to craft a sign that had an image of a duck, or maybe a waterfall, and then surround it with a bright red circle that had a strong diagonal slash across it – this would indicate that this particular overly-photographed subject was now forbidden to students. To be fair, Henri Cartier-Bresson made one transcendent photo late in life of a duck in a canal (turning to glimpse its own shadow), and somebody somewhere has possibly taken a photo of a waterfall that’s more interesting than the scene itself.

John Szarkowski famously observed of Atget, “10,000 pictures of Paris, not one of the Eiffel Tower” - so, not wanting to defy Atget, I’ve made fewer than a handful of Eiffel Tower photos in all the time I’ve spent in Paris, and in these, the tower is in the background and slightly out of focus. But this is still minor league taboo territory, and honestly, like Atget, I’m just not that interested in the Eiffel Tower.

The only rule I really pretty much stick to nowadays is one I didn’t think so much about when I was in my twenties: “Do not photograph young kids unaccompanied by an adult.” So much great photography has been done by young photographers in their early to mid-twenties who photographed children (again I’m thinking of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and also Helen Levitt.) Perhaps they were attracted to this subject because childhood was something they had recently passed through and therefore something they knew well. I photographed lots of kids in the 1980s - it may have been that this decade was the tail end of an era when kids could still roam their neighborhoods unsupervised. Something changed in the 1990s – maybe it had something to do with all the cable TV channels and the rampant air-conditioning. Cars got bigger and people drove about with their tinted windows rolled up. New communities were built that were surrounded by gates and fences. The people who remained walking the streets in the 90s were largely people who couldn’t afford cars. Where did all the kids go? I began to miss their public displays of play and mischief.

Today everyone has a camera with them at all times and their images can be disseminated in ways that were unimaginable not long ago. Society has also become less easy-going than it once was. I now have a three-year-old daughter and I’d be startled to find someone photographing her without my knowing why. So nowadays, if I see something that might be good to photograph that involves kids, I look for some sort of guardian. If no mature person is around to ask and explain, I let the scene slip by. 

Mark Steinmetz