"Chinese people love me because..... I always ask their permission before taking their photograph."Unfortunately, they usually say no. This girl selling dried fruits was the only one of several stallholders in my neighbourhood who agreed to let me take a snap of her when I last went prowling with my camera a month or so ago.
It goes rather beyond shyness, I think. A lot of older Beijingers - and quite a lot of young people, newly arrived from the sticks to work in jobs like this - seem to have a superstitious hang-up about being photographed: I don't know if it's quite that "stealing your soul" anxiety, but it's something pretty potent.
In a lot of the street scenes I've shot, I find on later examination that there's a foot or an elbow sticking out from behind a tree or a lamp-post in the middle distance..... where someone was trying to hide from my camera!
In general, I find it's better to use a really long lens and shoot surreptitiously from a distance. If people don't realise you're taking pictures, they don't get upset.
(Interesting moral problem, though: is this still a bit naughty? Particularly if you're taking quite a close-up portrait of someone?)
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