Shyness, rudeness and the ethics of street photography

Buddhist monks in Seoul, South Korea

May_16__201004.jpg, originally uploaded by regi metcalf.

Whenever I shoot on the street (my second favorite kind of photography, after landscapes), I have to overcome my native shyness to ask people if I can take their picture. I bat about 60%, which I consider a rather low average. I'm sure it has to do with my approach, but I keep working on it. At any rate, the problem is elided when trying to take candid shots where I want people as they are before they might lose the thing that made me want to take the picture in the first place. But that raises an ethical problem: what if they don't want their picture taken? The problem is complicated for me further by the fact that I usually share that feeling: I generally don't like to have MY picture taken, esp. without my knowledge (the absence of self-portraits in my work is not incidental). Obviously, at least two of the monks did not want to be photographed (probably none of them did, but the middle guy was just too slow to object). The irony here is that THAT is what makes the photograph. If I had asked them in advance, they would have politely refused and I would have walked away or they would have posed and the photo wouldn't have been half as good as I think it is. I had no idea what they would do (or even if they were aware) when I set myself to photograph them: they looked interesting, but not as interesting as they became. Of course, we all have to reconcile ourselves (or do we?) to the fact that we live in an age when walking in public is to tacitly consent to being photographed (either by civilians or the authorities). I wonder if I've violated these guys in some way (the way in which I might feel violated) by displaying this picture (let alone selling it, as I would LOVE to do someday). As I say, they (nor I) can have any expectation of privacy on a public street and the photo is MINE. But their image is THEIRS and although it's unlikely they would ever know what happened with the image after that day, it is out there in the world utterly free of their control. There's something a little scary about that and yet, perhaps, in the final analysis, that is the thing we all must learn to overcome: the illusion that we have much, if any, control. Indeed, that is something I might (erroneously?) expect Buddhist monks, of all people, to understand.