Let me start this off by saying something: this task intrigues me. Partially because I live in Chicago and partially because I love doing social experiments. When I first looked over this task, I thought something along the lines of HEY THIS IS INTERESTING. When I looked over it today, I thought, "Hey, I want to DO this."

So I set some simple goals for myself:

1) I would not photograph people I already know. This goal was set because I wanted to challenge myself. If I approached people I knew, this task would easily fill up with lots of people, and that wouldn't be any fun. There's no REAL risk of rejection from the people I know, so I wouldn't be putting anything out on the line. Which is a red flag for me, especially during tasking.

2) I would ask an equal amount of people from each gender AND an equal amount of people who are WORKING as opposed to those who are NOT AT WORK. I felt this created an interesting dynamic to study and would be much more fun to document.

3) I would do this all in a 2 hour span. Now, 2 hours may seem like a lot, but it really isn't... Wandering around Lincoln Park in Chicago makes it feel like even less so.

With those goals in mind, I think some of the results I obtained were... well, rather unexpected. In fact, I more ore less suspected that the EXACT OPPOSITE would happen, and am somewhat pleasantly surprised, though I have also lost a certain amount of faith in the good will of normal people. Oh well, on to the results!

In the 2 hours that I spent wandering around Lincoln Park, I solicited donations in the form of a picture from 26 men and 22 women. Of the men, 16 were working in some capacity, and 10 were not. Of the women, 8 were working, and 14 were not. My results may end up being slightly skewed because of these discrepencies, but I think the numbers are close enough to be workable.

Of the men, 4 allowed me to take pictures of them. All 4 of these men were at work.

Of the women, 1 allowed me to take a picture of her. She was at work, as well.

In the end, these 5 pictures were the only pictures I obtained. Now for some statistics!

According to the data I collected:

25.0% of men at work will allow a complete stranger to photograph them
0.0% of traveling/non-working men will allow the same
12.5% of women in their workplaces will allow a stranger to snap a picture of them
0.0% of women on the street will allow this
22.7% of working people are open to the idea of a stranger photographing them
15.4% of men are not camera-shy around strangers
4.5% of women are photogenic for strangers
0.0% of non-working people will allow snapshots of them to be taken by strangers
10.4% of people in general will allow photographs of them to be taken by a stranger

And, since you've probably been waiting for these the entire time, here are the pictures :D