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You know how, when people ask what your first concert was, you say KISS because it sounds cool—but it was really Donny and Marie Osmond? That's how I feel when people ask what inspired me to start doing street photography. 

The honest answer is a documentary I resisted seeing for two years because everyone else had already seen it. A friend finally dragged me to Finding Vivian Maier, and when I brushed it off—street photography is just people walking down the street—she said my poetry and song lyrics are highly visual and I might connect with a visual art form, especially one as democratic as this. She was right.

The story of a posthumously discovered genius was compelling, but the photos hooked me in a way I couldn't explain. I wanted to stop the film every time a photo appeared. I wanted to look at them as long as I could. We were meant to go to dinner after. Instead, I went home and stayed up until 4 a.m. scrolling Maier’s work online.

I once wrote a poem called Ordinary Things about how, as a kid, I accidentally burned down an abandoned house while playing with matches. A small flame became an inferno; people gathered; firefighters came. I'd summoned a dragon from paper and matches, and I couldn't look away. 

That's what Maier's photographs kept proving—and what sent me into Helen Levitt, Fred Herzog, Garry Winogrand, Jill Freedman, Joel Meyerowitz, and others over the week that followed. There are no ordinary things. 

And in street photography, there are no ordinary people.

Which sounds great—until you try it in East Vancouver. People get pretty fucking annoyed when you point a camera at them, especially without asking. My Canon M50 was a lightning rod: many confrontations, one police call, and a few violent threats. I either had to find a less alienating way to shoot or quit.

People are already surveilled everywhere, so when a real person points a lens at them, they react. I don’t blame them. Then I realized the solution was in my hand: my phone. People are used to phones. I taught myself to grip it one-handed and tap the shutter with my thumb, practicing quick raises and shots with only a glance at the screen. Framing was hard at first—I had to see fast—but now I could focus on photographs instead of confrontations.

Then came the bigger problem: getting good. 

Street photography is hard. It takes time to lose the clichés. It takes even longer to develop your instincts, to trust your intuition, to trust the rhythm of the street, sensing the shot before it happens. 

I call it seeing without seeing because mostly you can’t see the street fast enough in regular terms—there are no second chances. You feel it, you trust it and you shoot it. 

People talk about having a good eye. I think this is how you find your own unique way of seeing the world. And when you find that you can make photos people feel compelled to look at. It really is that simple, but getting there is complicated. Or, as the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancuși said “Simplicity is complexity resolved.”

The funny thing is, I’m no longer sure the camera was the real problem. 

While shooting my street photography collection Night Moves for Anvil Press, I photographed East Vancouver almost every day for a year. Over time I started framing more deliberately, raising my phone to eye level—making it obvious I was taking photos. But unlike before, people rarely reacted with anger or defensiveness; they’d meet my gaze and simply let me photograph them. 

There was no verbal exchange, yet there was an exchange: they allowed me to see them.

 I made this downtown photo essay slowly over several days without a single confrontation. It made me realize it isn’t about gear as much as it’s about me. Most communication is non-verbal, and when I started I was conflicted—why am I doing this, is it okay, will people get mad? People sensed that uncertainty and reacted to it. 

Now I’m calm, clear on my purpose, guided by an ethics of what I will and won’t shoot, and able to de-escalate when I upset someone. People sense that and they let me work. It’s a privilege to photograph on the street—one that’s earned, not given.

(Rodney DeCroo is a Vancouver street photographer, singer, poet, and playwright).