Camera Works: Unplugged

Pictures and text © Eki Qushay Akhwan


We - photographers - are keenly aware that the act of pointing our camera at our subjects has the effect of changing the nature of the subjects. At worse, they can become jittery and act strangely as if worried that the camera might catch them bare and naked. At best, they want to look better for the camera, acting out and putting a mask of superego compromise so that the camera might not see who they really are. Hence, we (or the camera) often fail to extract the essence that makes a personality unique.

There comes the questions: What if the camera was invisible? What would we see (camera capture) if our subjects were unaware of the camera presence?

Here are some pictures I recently took at a street festival in Bandung. I let the camera hang loose at the waist level, more or less. Technical control was minimal. Hence the shakes and loose exposures. In short, the camera was unplugged from my eye. The results are, as you can see, technically imperfect pictures; but, as you can also see, the technical imperfections, I think, are more than well compensated by what I can see through the faces. The camera unplugged, the subjects' masks off!