As a social documentary based street photographer, on any weekday morning on the streets of the City will fill with people who work in money. Suits, badges, coffee, phones held up to faces. I stand in it with a camera in my hand, black, small, obvious the moment you see it, and I make photographs of life as it is lived in the City. Anyone can see me doing it, that is the point, it is how I work making images.

A real camera is a visible device, one that is hard to hide. People see it in a fraction of a second, they see the lens come up, they know what it means, and they get to answer. Most do not care, some carry on, a few turn away or put a hand up or tell me to stop, and when they do I stop. The whole exchange happens in the open, in real time, between two people who can see each other. If someone wants to know what I am doing they ask, and I tell them. I try to photograph life as it is lived. I then go make more images.

Martin Parr put it well, you are not taking their image, you are making your own image. One frame, f/8, 1/500th of a second, and it is done. I do not learn anyone’s name. I do not tie the picture to a person unless I need to but on the street I am not. It matters, later as part of a book or a sequence, the image of  the person is not a data point to me, it is an image of life being lived. 

The Guardian ran a article this month by Tayo Bero about Meta’s AI smart glasses, while she did mention the celebrities being paid to make them look normal, Kylie Jenner was mentioned as promoting them. Bero’s worry is the covert filming capabilities and how for women this is not an abstract problem. Men have recorded women in bars and on the street and posted these to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, without their knowledge. Bero gave an example of one woman who was recorded and then asked for money to take the video down. Meta’s answer is a small LED light that is meant to come on when the glasses record, so people in theory should know. CNN spoke to women who never saw a light, and there are people online teaching others how to get round it. So the safeguard is a light that can be switched off, on a device built to sit on a face and look like a pair of glasses. I have to say they also look very Nerdy/Geeky as glasses go. 

Visibility in photography is accountability. A camera raised to the eye cannot be switched off or hidden, it is the whole gesture, and it is over in a fraction of a second in front of a person who can see it happen. Standing on the street with a camera everyone can see, I carry the consequence of what I do, in that moment, on that street. I can be questioned, I can be told/asked to stop. I can be told to delete a frame, and I can even be sworn at, and none of that is unreasonable. 

As an example of one counter with people who did not want to be photographed. Once, while I was making What is British?, my MA final project photographing a limited area within a mile of the Rotherhithe tunnel. Behind a petrol station, I watched three young men, who looked to me like they were up to something, though I could not for the life of me work out what. I watched them a while, then made a frame or two. They came over not happy at all, that I had take a photo, so I showed them the image on the back of the camera, and while they were innocent enough photographs, the lads standing about having a sneaky cigarette at the back of the petrol station. It turned out they had all been in court that morning and were somewhere they were not meant to be. We had a chat. I deleted the images, and that seemed to make them happy, as I was also an adult who had stopped, listened and showed them respect by deleting the image. We left on good terms.

The person wearing the glasses demonstrates none of that. They record from behind a face that gives nothing away, behind a light that may or may not be on, and the person in front of them rarely gets the chance to object.

And it does not stop at one person with a camera on their face. Wired found that Meta had quietly built face recognition into its app, a feature called NameTag that can pick a stranger out of what the glasses see, crop the face, and turn it into biometric data. Once a face becomes data it can be matched and kept, and that is where Bruce Schneier and Jon Penney pick up the thread. They wrote in the Guardian on 6 July about where this goes once it joins the wider surveillance industry. Facial recognition, mass databases, real-time identification, records kept and tied to your government file. China has over 600 million surveillance cameras. They describe a man, Lao Duan, blacklisted after he lost his job and could not repay his loans, whose face was picked out at a Beijing intersection and put on a billboard with his name, his citizen ID, and a message that he was untrustworthy. In the United States the Department of Homeland Security is expanding facial recognition and social media monitoring to keep tabs on immigrants, journalists, and protesters. Larry Ellison, who runs Oracle, said that Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting.

A camera on a stranger’s face is a sensor for that system. Every covert recording is a face that can be matched, stored, and kept. Especially when connected to something like Meta and its vast harvesting of our personal data. Schneier and Penney call what follows a chilling effect. People self-censor, they fall into line, they stop trying things, and social progress needs exactly the trying that fear kills. Same-sex relationships went from illegal to legal because a counterculture could experiment in public first, and show the rest of the country that morality moves. Watch everyone all the time and that stops.

What separates my camera from the glasses with a built in camera, is what each one is for, and where the picture ends up. I have been making photographs to show the traces of the finance industry on the social landscape of the city, one frame at a time, for a book and exhibition. The surveillance systems exist to identify you, keep the record, and enforce a rule against you the moment you break it, so that you behave because you know they are watching. These are not the same things. One is looking at the system we inhabit, one is the system looking at us. One is trying to understand the forces arrayed against us in everyday like, the other is trying to seek ways of control over aspects of our lives.

My techniques make the case on their own. If I am using my film camera, it is mechanical with no screen, no burst mode, no wifi, no cloud. Film costs me real money something like £6 to £14 a roll, so I am conservative with it. I make one frame or two frames and I live with it. If I missed it I missed it. There is no database on the back of the camera. There is a negative, then a print, and my name against the work, not against the people in it. If I am using a digital camera the files go home to my computer, where I will take time to edit and choose which images to use. Not every image is good in fact most are not showing anything, so will never be seen again. I am looking for images that communicate something to the viewer on an emotional level not simple easy images.

I am not brave for standing on the street with a camera. I go, this is my work that I chose to make and being seen doing it, is part of the deal, I make with the people I photograph. Using smart glasses would break that deal by hiding it. Form an ethical standpoint this is not something I am comfortable with.

Schneier and Penney end on a choice, and they are right about it. None of this is fixed. We can ban facial recognition, we can restrict what data gets kept and for how long, we can regulate the most invasive uses, and we can decide that a camera which hides itself is not one we want on the street. I will keep standing where you can see me. I do not think the machine behind the glasses or the CCTV cameras multiplying in our towns and cities will ever offer you the same.

I would then recommend that being visible as a Street Photographer, is a really useful tool in your set of things to think about when out making images. As it gives others the chance to say no, it also opens the possibility of a connection with a fellow human being, which is a great side benefit of being open to others with what you are doing. Just remember to say that you are working on a project, as this often helps to break the ice when talking about your work with strangers.

Bibliography

Bero, T. (2026) ‘Smart glasses are deeply creepy. Why are celebrities like Kylie Jenner endorsing them?’, The Guardian, 17 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/17/ai-meta-smart-glasses (Accessed: 17 July 2026).

Schneier, B. and Penney, J. (2026) ‘AI surveillance is being supercharged – and it will chill social progress’, The Guardian, 6 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/06/ai-surveillance-policy (Accessed: 17 July 2026).