Photo Credit: © Michal Daniel Michal Daniel invaded people's personal space to get images of passers-by in unguarded moments.

Michal Daniel's street portraits of unsuspecting subjects add up to a compelling and provocative body of work. With spy-like stealth, he gets as close as he possibly can to his subjects and while pretending to be distracted by his digital organizer, he photographs them with an outmoded and rather shoddy mini camera.

The result is a series of tight 640 x 480-pixel images of passers-by in unguarded moments. The camera's plastic lens, lack of dynamic range and digital noise lend a surreal quality. Even if Daniel's methods make you uneasy, the images have a certain magnetism, and you can't help but look.

Working on his "In Your Face" project since 2001, Daniel has operated in an ethical gray zone explored previously by other street photographers and photojournalists, most notably Walker Evans and Bruce Gilden.

"I know it rubs people [the] wrong way that I'm insinuating myself into people's space and stealing a private moment for my own 'gain,'" says Daniel, who makes his living photographing theater companies and stage productions.

"I've asked myself, 'How will they [the subjects] feel? Will they be hurt?' But then that is at bottom the question of every photograph of any person, made anywhere or anytime without their consent." He adds, "When I see something that makes my soul sing, I can't stop." The images are a reflection of himself, he says, and he feels compelled to share. "I'm making my own self-portrait."

Daniel has been experimenting with ways to record images secretly for three decades. His motive is to avoid the camera's influencing effects, he says. "People know there's a camera, and everything changes. I know it changes. I grew up with it."

His father was Czech film director Frank Daniel, who fled Soviet persecution and emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1960s. Ironically, Daniel despised photographers because of the rude, intrusive attentions of the paparazzi. But after joining the U.S. Army in the late Seventies in order to oppose Russia and communism, he ended up in the photography corps because it suited his personality.

"Everybody is saluting, and I'm making pictures. They're marching forwards, I'm walking backwards. I'm tired, I go into the darkroom and take a nap," says Daniel, who admits to a rebellious streak. "If there's a rule, I've got to question it. I'm a product of communist Czechoslovakia."

Though Daniel took up photography as an escape, the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliot Erwitt and Robert Frank got his attention. He was drawn to the clarity and detached observation of Cartier-Bresson in particular, and that spurred his preoccupation with the camera's intrusiveness.

In the early Eighties, he spent a year surreptitiously photographing patrons in strip joints by hiding a Leica under a hat.

"That was the precursor to this whole [In Your Face] thing," he says. The latter project was made possible by the introduction of the Handspring Eyemodule2 camera in 2001. It was a 640 x 480 image-recording device sold as an accessory for the Handspring Visor, a now out-of-production personal digital assistant. Daniel bought the PDA and the camera, and immediately regretted it.

"I was horrified. I wasted $400. I was so mad, I can't tell you. It had low resolution, low quality, distortion, a plastic lens, no [exposure] latitude, pixelation, a red center…oh, man!"

But he'd spent the money, and didn't want it to go to waste, so he "forced himself to push the button," he says. Gradually he got used to the camera's quirks and figured out how to use its weaknesses to his advantage. He launched a Web site, www.640x480.net, to display the more interesting images he managed to capture.

He was inspired to start the "In Your Face" portrait project when he noticed that some of the colorful characters in his East Village neighborhood in New York were being forced out by gentrification.

Daniel's modus operandi is to start positioning himself for a close encounter as soon as he spots at a distance someone who interests him. Sometimes he engages the subject in conversation. Other times he pretends to be engrossed by his PDA as he passes by. Either way, his objective is to keep the subject unaware of what he's up to. "At most they look at the PDA and think, 'What the hell is he doing with that thing?' and 'He's too close to me.'"

"The intention is [to get] the Walker Evans unguarded moment, when you see into the soul of the person. They're not aware that they're being photographed. They're not thinking about me."

Daniel usually shoots from waist level, about 18 inches from his subjects' faces, so they end up looming above the camera and looking past it. That tends to raise questions in the viewer's mind, Daniel explains. "I want you to be asking, 'What's going on? Who is this person? What are they thinking about? What are they doing? What happened in their life?'"

Walker Evans didn't get as close to his unsuspecting subjects as Daniel, but Bruce Gilden certainly does. Daniel praises Gilden's work, but distances himself from Gilden's methods. "He literally pounces into your space and then bams you with his flash. That's exactly what I don't want to do. I want to sneak into your space, where I'm completely invisible…I don't want a picture of somebody that's who's scared of me."

Subjects sometimes do catch Daniel in the act, and for those occasions, he carries a small book of his images so he can explain that he's a photographer and show what he does. So far, no subjects have recognized themselves on his Web site or in a Blurb book he self-published in 2006.

Daniel's disregard for the social conventions of photographing strangers may raise the eyebrows and even the ire of some. But he isn't breaking any laws, in the opinion of New York attorney Nancy Wolff.

"It's art. It's considered free speech," as long as Daniel isn't using his images without the subject's permission to advertise products and services, Wolff says. "New York privacy law is very narrowly construed in favor of the First Amendment." (In one recent case a New York court dismissed a privacy invasion claim against Philip Lorca DiCorcia, who made portraits of people walking through Times Square without their consent, and later sold prints through his gallery for thousands of dollars.)

Daniel's biggest worry now is the obsolescence of his Handspring Visor and Eyemodule 2 camera. They're out of production and no longer available, and they tend to break. They're also incompatible with newer PC operating systems (Daniel is dependent on Windows 2000 to access the images).

"I bought 20 modules and 20 organizers on eBay for a song," Daniel says. "As long as the software keeps [working], I'm good."

To see more of Daniel's project go to: http://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2009/05/michal-daniel-in-your-face/