Don’t point the camera at private moments

Harry films almost everything, which is what makes the exceptions worth recording. The rule he applies is not about permission — in both cases below nobody stopped him and he says so — but about whether the footage would take something from the people in frame. When it would, he either lowers the camera or turns it around.

How Harry applies it

He stops. At the cremation ghats of Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, he films the open-air cremations from a distance and explains what is happening. Then he comes back round to find bodies being prepared with the family present and crying, and doesn’t film it. His reason, given to camera afterwards, is worth quoting in substance: he probably could have, and it wasn’t relevant. Not a rule imposed on him — a judgement about what the shot was for.

He turns the camera on himself. Walking the busiest streets of Lyari in Karachi, where a lot of the people around him are women, he points the lens at his own face and narrates rather than filming the street — while acknowledging the obvious problem, which is that from a distance it still looks like he’s filming them.

He also applies it to himself, and inconsistently. In Bethlehem he pays his driver a large sum at the end of a long day — the driver had tried to refuse and asked only for petrol money — and says on camera that he deliberately didn’t film the handover, because he didn’t want to be filming that. On the same trip he films the whole of a $1,000 shop for families in a refugee camp. He doesn’t explain the difference and it is worth recording that he doesn’t: the rule is a judgement made shot by shot rather than a policy, and the two decisions land on opposite sides of it.

The same instinct shows up in smaller ways: he declines to go inside a mosque in a Karachi residential district on the grounds that he’d rather not, and he asks before filming inside religious buildings rather than after.

And the reason, which he does eventually give

The paragraph above says he never explains the line he draws around his own life. At his brother’s wedding in Barranquilla he does, and it is worth having as the nearest thing to a stated policy: vlogs and personal life should stay separate.

He says it twice. Before the ceremony, that he will film some of it because his brother wants a record but wants to actually be present at it; and afterwards, that this is why he doesn’t normally publish anything like this, and that the video exists only because so many viewers asked for it. The wedding itself is cut to a few minutes of a full day.

It does not resolve the inconsistency, but it renames it. The line isn’t between other people’s private moments and his own — he applies the same judgement to both — it is between what a video is for and what he is simply living through. The $1,000 shop he filmed and the payment to the driver he didn’t now sit either side of that, and so does an entire wedding.

Demonstrated in

• The Worlds Most Unlivable Megacity That Still Works 🇵🇰 — filming himself instead of the women of Lyari.
• Nepalese Girl Shows Me Kathmandu🇳🇵 — putting the camera down at a family’s cremation.
• I got Kicked out of the Golden Temple for this 🇮🇳 — swimming in the holy water at Amritsar and saying on camera that he will not film the women bathing nearby.
• Inside the Taliban’s Most Notorious City (Afghanistan) 🇦🇫 — two things he deliberately doesn’t shoot in Kandahar. He pays for every child at a trampoline park to have a turn, asks the owner to let the girls on after the boys pushed in front, and then keeps the camera off them entirely. He also films none of the military walls and watchtowers, which are everywhere and which get you in trouble.
• 48 Hours with West Africa’s Most Notorious Warlord 🇱🇷 — walking through the drug area of the West Point settlement in Monrovia, Harry passes teenagers nodding off in the street and says on camera that he isn’t going to film them: they didn’t consent to it and it would be harsh. He describes what he saw instead, which is the whole of this page in one decision.
• I investigated illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank 🇵🇸🇮🇱 — the rule turned on his own generosity rather than on someone else’s grief, and the one entry where he applies it in one place and not in another.
• Hiking to a Nudist Beach in Colombia 🇨🇴 — the cheapest application of the rule anywhere on this page, and the one furthest from vulnerability. Nobody at the nudist beach next to Cabo San Juan is grieving, poor, or in a country where being filmed is dangerous; they are lawfully undressed in a public place and would have been in shot by default. Harry points the camera at the sea for the length of the beach and says why. It extends the rule past “would this take something from someone vulnerable” to “did these people choose a place on the assumption of not being filmed” — and it costs him one pan and a sentence of narration.
• My Brothers Wedding in Colombia 🇨🇴 — the rule applied to a whole day of his own life, and the one place he says why: vlogs and personal life stay separate.