The Camera Is Just the Permission Slip | A Neighborly Tip
The Camera Is Just the Permission Slip | A Neighborly Tip Photo by Brooke Balentine (@brooke.balentine) I noticed something the first time I organized a little photography walk around my neighborhood. Nobody talked much at the start — just a handful of people with phones and one guy with an actual film camera he seemed almost embarrassed about. But about twenty minutes in, someone stopped in front of an old chain-link fence with a single rosebush growing through it, and suddenly three people were crouched beside her, all of us seeing something we had walked past a hundred times without really registering. That's the thing about giving people a "reason" to look. The camera isn't really the point. The looking together is. I think what makes a photography walk work as a community thing — more than a class or a meetup with an agenda — is that it strips away the pressure of conversation. You don't have to think of something clever to say. You just notice,...