Special subjects

"You always want to know who is behind the work", says John Maloof in his film about the fiercely private amateur street photographer Vivian Maier. True, perhaps - but what about the person who's actually in the work? How often do we encounter an iconic photograph and forget about who took it, look beyond its aesthetic qualities and cut through the accreted layers of political, sociohistorical or cultural importance to genuinely see the subject(s) themselves? Not often enough.

I realised recently, for example, that I'd seen this incredible Tish Murtha photo countless times without once stopping to wonder who the kids in the photo might be. As an article in the Guardian's fascinating series That's Me In The Picture revealed, the two lads leaping joyously out of the window onto the stacked mattresses were her brothers - as was the boy in the foreground with the ventriloquist's dummy that gives the image its slightly surreal, slightly unsettling edge.

More often than not, though, the photographer has no prior connection to the person in the picture. To Diane Arbus, Herman Gruber was just a curiously (and perhaps comically) photogenic stranger who caught her eye on Coney Island. But to Joan Gruber, he was a flesh-and-blood father-in-law. In an article for the New York Post, Reuven Fenton traced the remarkable backstory of a Jewish man who started life in what is now Ukraine, lost his family to the Nazis and was imprisoned during the Second World War, but who wound up having his portrait posthumously hung in an exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York.

Finding yourself the unwitting subject of a photo that goes viral can be fortuitous and lucrative in the long term - just ask Zoe Roth aka "Disaster Girl", who recently sold her meme picture as a non-fungible token for nearly $500,000 to pay off student debts. But photos can break lives as well as make them, as Mary Ann Vecchio discovered when she was snapped reacting in panic and horror to death of student Jeffrey Miller in the Kent State shootings on 4th May 1970. For the 14-year-old girl, John Filo's image brought instant fame and infamy that - as Patricia McCormick underlined in this illuminating Washington Post article - fundamentally determined the course of Vecchio's life. Student photographer Filo, meanwhile, reaped the benefits of global exposure of his work and went on to build a successful career, but was himself haunted by the incident and uneasy at having profited from it - until Vecchio personally granted him forgiveness.

Protests and demonstrations like the one at Kent State are much photographed for obvious reasons: the juxtaposition of opposing sides, the dynamics of clashing factions - and the intimate human dramas that play out amid the noise and chaos. Little wonder that Todd Robertson's picture of a young child in a Ku Klux Klan outfit reaching out to touch the riot shield of a black police officer was instantly identified by the managing editor of the Gainesville Times as something special, and that the image continues to have resonance today. Poynter's David Griner spoke to Robertson about his spontaneous snap, but the identities of child and cop remain unknown.

David Rose's photo of Rose Brash, taken at the Battle of the Beanfield confrontation between hippies and police near Stonehenge in 1985, resonates for a similar reason: she's carrying her six-month-old daughter Kaya, who, like the Gainesville toddler, was an innocent victim of circumstances. Unlike the toddler's mother, though, she was handed the opportunity to tell her story. "It wasn't a battle, because we offered no resistance", she told the Guardian - and while it may have looked as though she and Kaya were being led to safety by a kindly officer, she revealed that the reality was rather different.

As this suggests, contrary to the cliche, the camera can lie (and indeed often does) - and it's often thanks to those actually in the pictures that misperceptions can be flagged. Ruth Orkin's 'An American Girl In Italy', taken in Florence in 1951, is almost invariably seen as showing the persistent and oppressive street harassment faced by lone female travellers. And yet to the American girl herself, Ninalee Craig, as well as to Orkin's daughter Mary Engel, the photo depicted "independence, freedom and self-determination". Far from feeling objectified by unwanted male attention, Craig was "thrilled" and "having the time of my life". The conclusion to be drawn is clear: we modern viewers should be wary of imposing our own assumptions on the picture and (in Craig and Engel's eyes, at least) misreading it as a result.

That appearances can be deceptive is also underlined by Thomas Hoepker's infamous photo of Brooklynites seemingly lounging and chatting contentedly and carefree in the sunshine as the Twin Towers burn in the background. The photographer himself was sufficiently disturbed by the scene as to avoid publishing the image in a book. When he finally did so, in 2006, his subjects were roundly vilified for their apparent detachment from the horrors unfolding across the water, prompting two of them - Walter Sipser and his then-girlfriend Chris Schiavo - to step forwards and set the record straight. The friends were, Sipser told Slate, actually "in a profound state of shock and disbelief", and resented finding themselves the victims of unwarranted assumptions.

Hoepker's image has subsequently become one "about history, and about memory", according to the Guardian's Jonathan Jones - illustrating the unpalatable truth that even in the midst of catastrophe and disaster, "life does not stop dead". And yet this reading remains at odds with the testimonies of the subjects themselves. We get so accustomed to seeing the faces of people in the work of celebrated photographers; sometimes it's illuminating to hear their voices too.