In my on-going effort to discourage any attempts anyone might have to make friends with me, I made this second video in my UNPOPULAR OPINION series.
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This unpopular opinion video had to much nuance to provoke!
All I can say is that there’s another useful situation where photographing peoples backs make sense. That is when a view from behind establishes someone looking at or interacting with somebody or something. You can often see, even from behind, what someone is looking at. This can then establish a sort of narrative.
I’m sorry, I’ll try to be more provocative next time.
You are correct.
Thanks for the video. You are right, sometimes more courage is needed. I’ll work on that.
To add to your list of exceptions, a shot from behind prevents people from becoming aware of the photographer and thus changing their behavior. I particularly like this image.
Being a leader of an outdoor excursion makes it harder to take good photos of people. Best assigned to someone who isn’t engaged but happens to like and excel in photography. 
Hmm. The monologue is illustrated by a video with faces that are too distant to see clearly. Instead, we can receive emotions from body language, eg the man and boy at about 3m 40s.
“The human face is very descriptive. It is very telling. We have evolved to understand a tremendous amount about people just by looking at their faces …”
Well, that is true, kind of. But who are “we”? I suppose “we” are the 98% of people without prosopagnosia, which is a general inability to recognise faces, and can include an inability to interpret expressions.
Last century, when I lost the ability to recognise family, friends and colleagues, I spent a few years making thousands of photographs of their faces. I recognise a face in a familiar photo when I don’t recognise the person in real life. So the photos supplied a substitute experience.
More generally, photos of faces can be “lazy, cowardly and boring.” Lazy when the photographer is simply capturing capturing what the subject is supplying. Cowardly when there is no human engagement. Boring when the photographer just wants to inject “human interest”.
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Yes that is a great photo and a good example of a situation where shooting people from behind does work.
I beg to differ
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That would be one of the exceptions I mentioned.
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