About Street Portraits, day fourteen of 30. What is the answer to the ‘exploitation’ topic?

The topic being that Street Photography of homeless / addicted people is exploitation.  For me this came up one afternoon when, in a crowd of non photographers, I mentioned catching a good photo of someone.  The immediate response “isn’t that exploitation?”.  It caught me off guard, and frankly pissed me off too.  So, in a low EQ moment, I posted it to an Instagram real.  And to my surprise some of the San Diego photographers that I admire said it was exploitation. So. Yeah. Does that mean it is?  Like street photography itself, everyone has opinions about what it is and what it isn’t.  Likewise for what makes a good photo. Likewise for film vs digital. Likewise for permission. And on, and on, and on. It is also easy to point to other things are not defined as exploitative, but are, or things that are far more exploitive.  Super easy to try to justify  or defend.  I’ll just lay it out.  The world is a f*cked up place, people die and that’s the end of it. I think people who sit on bar stools or social media platforms making comments like that are ones who don’t have a seasoned, expansive view of the world, and just say sh!t.  They’ll be ok.  I’ll keep taking photos.