Candid Camera (Notes on Secret Photography)

Monday 22 September, 2025, 11:31 

Stratford Station, London, England 

(SA/2025)

'The photographer is ... the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. 

Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world picturesque.' [1]

I. 

 

Candid photography is the capturing of images that, in a sense, have suggested themselves to the camera; spontaneous snaps of a scene, an event, or an anonymous subject that reveal the world in its randomness and objective innocence. 

 

If there is any hint of a pose - or any indication that the photographer is attempting to frame things aesthetically or ideologically, for example, and thereby impose their ideas or values on the image - then the picture is immediately robbed of its candid nature [2].

 

However, that's not to say candid photography reveals the truth of the world, even if it offers a glimpse of the world as is. And one must always be aware of the fact that no representation is ever really honest; the camera always lies and the world, no matter how exposed it may appear, is always fundamentally in darkness.  

       

 

II. 

 

The image used above is, I think, a good example of a candid (and covert) snapshot. It was taken yesterday, at Stratford Station, in East London, and shows a young woman standing on platform 8 waiting for an Elizabeth line train to Shenfield. 

 

I was standing opposite on platform 9 waiting for a Greater Anglia train to Liverpool Street. I thought it was unusual to see someone isolated on what is often a very busy platform and she struck me as very much a contemporary London girl; carrying a tote bag, holding an i-Phone in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, tattoed legs and green dyed hair. 

 

I've no idea who she is, but I like to imagine she's a student at the London College of Fashion; or a jewellery designer who has a studio in Hackney. Similarly, I like to think that, should this image ever come to her attention, she'll be fine with my having taken it and then publishing it here [3]. 

 

In a sense, a silent and secretive act - committed whilst in a shared public space and which involved what Baudrillard terms the photographic gaze (i.e., one that does not seek to probe or analyse or master reality, but, with a sort of insouciance, non-intrusively capture the apparition of objects) [4] - has brought us into initimate complicity. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1]  Susan Sontag, On Photography, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 55.  

 

[2] Obviously, this is the ideal. In practice, it's very hard to take a purely candid photograph, if only because even the most naive and amateur of photographers - i.e., one such as myself who knows very little about composition and the technical aspects of taking a picture - still views things with an intelligent eye and cannot resist retrospectively imposing a narrative or philosophically-informed interpretation on the image. 

      I'm also vaguely aware of the history of photography and the important place of candid images within that history; so radically different from the traditional posed pictures. 

      However, as far as possible, I have snapped candidly by sticking to my one snap and one snap only rule, never trying to capture the same image twice, or make a technically superior version; if I miss the decisive moment well, that's too bad (there'll be others).   

 

[3] Whilst I don't have full knowledge of the law, I believe that in the UK one doesn't require explicit consent to take someone's photo if they are in a public space, especially if, as in this case, the image is reproduced solely for editorial and artistic purpose and is not being used commercially. I think France has much tighter laws around this whole area to do with image rights and personal privacy.   

 

[4] See Jean Baudrillard, 'Photography, Or The Writing Of Light', trans. Francois Debrix in Baudrillard Now (22 April, 2023): click here to read online.  

      This essay was originally published in French as 'La Photographie ou l’Ecriture de la Lumiere: Litteralite de l’Image', in L'Echange Impossible (Éditions Galilée, 1999), pp. 175-184. An earlier translation into English, by Chris Turner, can be found in Impossible Exchange (Verso, 2001), pp. 139-147, where it is entitled as 'Photography, or Light-Writing: Literalness of the Image'.

      I am aware, of course, that Baudrillard hates the digitilisation of photography as an art form and would not acknowledge my image taken on an i-Phone to be a photograph in the sense he understands it (lacking both sovereignty and punctual exactitude). See section IX in part 2 of the post on Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (16 September 2025): click here.