A tourist on the horns of a dilemma

My wife had noticed a man following us about 25 feet back. He seemed nice enough and was wearing a suit jacket; occasionally he spoke into a radio. We asked our Moroccan guide who he was. He said a policeman who was a friend of his, hired to watch our backs for pickpockets and keep the more aggressive street vendors from swarming us.

The tiny alleys were impossibly narrow and dark and I imagined that, if we had no escort, this whole thing might have gone quite differently. At one point, I went to take a picture of a man in a shoe-repair shop that could have been inherited from his great-grandfather. It was a crevice, maybe six feet wide, and filled with old leather and tools, the man's lined face barely visible in back. He saw me photographing him, and, making an angry noise, came after me.

Should I have shot that photograph? Sometimes I wonder. Am I being rude, am I intruding, do I have any photographic rights in this interlude that I traveled so far and paid so much money to achieve?

Ethics in photography gets a lot of play now in terms of talking about digital manipulation of images, what is real and what is Photoshopped fake. There's concern over nature photography that could disturb animals that may be endangered. However, I am speaking of taking pictures of people, in their natural surroundings, for my own pleasure and use while traveling.

I wouldn't mind asking for a release or even paying for a shot of people, but it just takes so much time. After a tedious negotiation, I am usually rewarded with a posed "touristy" picture that I wanted to avoid in the first place. For me, the ideal is to photograph people in their natural surroundings living life, undisturbed and unaware. Therein lies the problem. If they knew they were being photographed, would they object? If they didn't know and were not interfered with, would it be OK? I mean no harm and, for the most part, simply want to capture my wonderful adventure to share with friends and family. Do I have that right?

Often, in situations where I want to be incognito, I will use the flip-out 360 degree LCD screen to make it appear I am doing, or looking at, something else other than my subject. Sometimes with a smaller camera, I might set the timer and put the camera on a table out of the way and out of mind, to capture an image. When the camera is up to my face and aimed right at someone, it can be intimidating. People certainly wonder: What is he doing, what does he want with me? This is true whether in Seattle or across the world.

Each situation is different and some are hard to decipher. Our guide tried to steer me by saying "ah, this is a nice picture," and pointing at a standard kitsch scene. I tried to be nice and show interest each time and occasionally snapped a photo.

In this way we seemed to balance in a yin-yang of privacy and perceived decorum against my eye's hunger for the exotic and spicy marketplace images I wanted to burn into my memory, for the rest of my life.

Ed Peters lives in Seattle.

The Travel Essay, written by readers about an adventure or insight, runs Sunday in The Seattle Times and online at seattletimes.com. Essays, which are unpaid, must be no longer than 600 words and will be edited for content and length. E-mail to travel@seattletimes.com or send to Travel, The Essay, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. Because of the volume of submissions, individual replies are not always possible.