The observer effect in street photography and portraiture
The moment you realise you’re being photographed, your personality immediately freezes, like a rabbit in headlights, except the headlights are attached to a camera and the rabbit is you. What’s left is a so called camera face, which is like your normal face, but anxiously trying to meet norms and expectations. A shift in demeanor. An act. This is called the observer effect. Or possibly flatulence… hard to remember which, because they sort of look the same.
Examples from the daily life
The observer effect basically means things (not just people in photographs) change when they’re being watched. The term shows up in different contexts: physics, social science and in everyday life. It happens literally everywhere. When you’re alone, you could be eating like a wild animal, even though you’d never do that on a dinner table with company. Or have you ever forgot how to walk normally, when you are crossing a road while noticing a car in the traffic lights, suspecting that the driver is looking at you? Even office printers behave differently when observed. They work perfectly well until you stand next to them, at which point they explode.
Observer effect in portrait photography
In portrait photography, this problem is especially obvious. You point a camera at someone, and suddenly they don’t even know what to do with their hands. They hold their breath, tilt their head at unnatural angles, and produce a smile that looks like it’s being held hostage. The moment someone knows they are being photographed, their behaviour and posture often shifts. Even subtle awareness can create tension or stiffness, leading to posed rather than natural expressions.
Photographers have spent decades inventing tricks to work around this. The way the photographer interacts; giving direction, remaining quiet, or engaging in conversation, changes how the subject responds. Some keep talking so the subject relaxes, asking casual questions like “what did you have for breakfast?” or “do you think pigeons are just drones with feathers?”
Others use humour, the fake laugh leading to the real laugh is a classic. Some deliberately distract the subject with props, like giving them a coffee cup to hold or telling them to play with their hair, which immediately solves the hand problem. (It is easier to figure out what to do with hands if you have something in them.)
Some photographers take a sneaky approach, snapping away between actual poses when the subject thinks the camera isn’t looking. These in-between moments often end up being the best shots, because for half a second the subject forgot to act human and just was human.
Some other well proven methods are literally asking the model to forget that you, the photographer, is present, by just trying to sink into their own inner world for a moment, intentionally trying to forget that they are being photographed. It can almost act as a hypnotic suggestion, but it only works if the model is fully invested in the creative act as well.
It may help to give the model an assignment, giving them with something concrete to do, directing their attention away from being observed and recorded. It can be something really simple like dancing or running around, which yields much more natural and interesting results than saying “just sit there and look pretty.” In a way, it is almost like pretending to be an actor in a movie. It isn’t necessarily the same thing as capturing one’s true self, but at least considerably closer to that. Incorporating music to the photoshoot always helps too.
Observer effect in street photography
Street photography tries to bypass the whole problem by catching people unawares, pretending the observer isn’t there at all. Instead of asking someone to sit still and look natural, you photograph them mid-stride, or deep in thought, or mid-bite of a sandwich. These moments are supposed to look real. But even so, the observer effect sneaks back in. The second someone notices you pointing a camera at them on the street, their behaviour shifts — they straighten their coat, turn their face, or give you a look that says, “why are you photographing me eating a sandwich?” Some people question the ethics of street photography by pointing out that it invades people’s privacy to photograph them without consent, but it should be obvious, looking from this perspective, that the aim is only to preserve the candid qualities, therefore the artistic validity and documentary values of the photograph, and not to harass anyone.
The philosophical question, then, is whether we ever really see someone as they are. Can a camera ever capture someone’s true self? Maybe people are always performing. Performing for the camera, for strangers and even for themselves. Maybe authenticity doesn’t exist outside of observation, like the Sasquatch or reasonably priced Kodak film.
Richard Avedon thought the performance was the truth, while others thought the truth was hiding behind the performance. Personally, I think the truth is just that most people don’t know what to do with their hands in photos.
So whether it’s a studio portrait or a street shot, the camera doesn’t just record what’s there, it actually shapes it too. Sometimes by making people stiffen up, sometimes by catching them in a rare unguarded instant. Either way, the photograph isn’t the whole truth. It’s a version of the truth that only exists because it was being watched, which is actually quite profound, or it might just mean we should all stop worrying about our hands.
