time bends

Ever wondered what it's like to travel back in time? Well I've just managed to go back thirty years to a former synagogue off Brick Lane via a disused shop in Rotterdam. Just like Mr Benn.

  

Why was I there? Let me start at the end. 

I don't often put my work forward for awards. I like to find a particular angle of interest. I'm a photographer obvs. Gus Powell's curation of a show in Los Angeles last year ticked a couple of boxes as someone's whose work I respected in a city where one of my daughter's was living at the time. 

This year my eye was caught by Shutter Hub's STREET/FORM show featuring photographs printed on newsprint pasted around the walls of a disused shop in the south of Rotterdam, part of POW WOW NOW a festival of urban culture encompassing graffiti and spoken word artists, street dance, music and sports. I ran out of boxes to tick.

 

I selected work from New Europe I thought would work well in that format. Graphical, lots of tones and with a common theme.  

I was really pleased three were selected and even more so when I saw them up as part of a group show of seventy photographers from around the world. The theme leaned towards the fabric of the street rather than people so it was interesting to see my work in that context especially as I'm trying to bring more of the environment around us into my pictures.

I also enjoyed the irreverence of using newsprint and sticking them to the wall with tape. It immediately took me back to one of my first photography shows in the late 80s in 19 Princelet Street in a place immortalised in Rodzinsky's Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair

The former synagogue was in transition to becoming a heritage centre and we seized the opportunity to put on a show of painting and photography. I took the basement as a suitable space to reflect my aesthetic, taking pleasure in dragging pieces of corrugated iron down the stairs to paste my photocopied photos on to. Hey forgive me. I was young and crazy. I do remember taking a sack truck out of the building along Brick Lane and wondering about the circumstances it last made that journey. 

I pause to reflect. Have I moved forward at all? I hesitate to use the world professionally so let's use the art word practice.  It's the same technical approach using essentially the same cameras. The location is constant and any variation is again very similar. So that's the How. What about the Why? 

I confess there's something obsessive if not insane about repeating the same task over and over again hoping for a different outcome. My pictures are to a large degree the same. I find it fascinating that my earlier work in particular has a timeless/locationless (is that a word?) quality. It means I miss out on a chance to submit to the tremendous Cafe Royal Books as they really don't work as site or date specific documents of those times. However for me they convey something more universal and that's taken me into the territory of a more oblique kind of storytelling: metaphor, suggestion, ambiguity. Not a radical departure granted but another way of seeing, another way of walking. 

Another point of departure.

always first steps

I'm really enjoying my participation in the my local London Independent Photography group. I'm in my second year which feels like a (small) achievement after previous failures to commit to group photography projects.

As well as showing and discussing photography the group is actively involved in local exhibitions. Last year's group show had a really interesting theme and this year's is just as good. So good I've ended up in the team organising it!

Oblique Strategies is an approach that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt evolved in the 70s to overcome creative blocks. I remember interviews with David Bowie talking about his writing technique of cutting up words so it was fascinating to see how this had been formalised, industrialised even, into a process and used on his Berlin albums produced by, guess who, Brian Eno.

Each of the group were drawn a statement from the set of Oblique Strategies to respond to with a photograph. Always First Steps was mine. Well how easy was that going to be? Despite an aspiration to try different techniques by joining the group I do find myself back in my safety zone. So how about a blur of shoes on Waterloo Station's Odessa Steps? Perhaps a crowd crossing Oxford Circus Shibuya-style? Over complicating it? OK then, a kid on reins. Job done.

Well not quite. 

To do justice to the project - and Brian and David too - I felt I needed to dig a little deeper. One of the many exciting aspects of talking photographs on the street is, one of my favourite words, serendipity. That moment when two, or more if you're especially fortunate, elements come together. They are rare but incredibly rewarding. 

So what did I come up with? 

This.

The reason why I don't title any of my pictures is just to let people read whatever they want into them. It was one of the motivations for The Ambiguous Project!

It's fascinating showing this image to people, revealing the "title" and listening to their interpretation. I'm sure there's some psychological process at work here. The same way perhaps we make connections between images and soundtracks we need to rationalise what we're seeing, no matter how arbitrary. To achieve dissonance is a real challenge. Aha. 

I feel another project coming on...

bienvenidos angelenos

If you've seen my work in the Los Angeles Center of Photography's latest show Street Shooting Around the World then welcome!

 

I'm really proud to have been selected by Gus Powell. The image has particular resonance as I've taken it in my home town London as part of my current series New Europe.    

It's not a documentary project, more a personal response to what it is now to live in Europe. You can read more about that story here.

It's great to show in America again as my time living in New York City back in the 80s was an incredible influence on my work, and life too in lots of ways.

If you're interested in finding out more about my work you can reach me at sean@waysofwalking.net

Thank you!

tag time

Really pleased to participate in the Tag exhibition with my local London Independent Photography group. It's great to see thoughts that I explored in my Ambiguous book project come to life in a collection of images that ducks and weaves through urban, portraiture, landscape and still life across city, town and country. 

A big bonus is the decision to print all the images in black and white. Without any influence from me, honestly! I actually wonder the difference colour would have made in the connections that each photographer has made. Monochrome's ability to accentuate the composition of an image featured in a number of interpretations. Would colour have led to more emotional responses? I recognised my initial rational response to the images I had to work with but actually enjoyed letting my mind wander...hey I'm a flaneur, right?

It's a well worn topic I know. Black and white was regarded as having a greater truth, whatever that may be. Colour was ironically too much like reality. In a way less art, more artisan. I don't recall making a conscious decision, like with a lot of things, to choose black and white. It's just how I see the world. 

As well as responding to a brief I also enjoyed the challenge of working against the clock. Almost like a real photographer!  

To give each participant sufficient time to respond to their image meant a turnaround time of a week for each photograph. No big deal for digital, not so straight forward in the analogue world. I've come to enjoy the related but distinct parts of my image making process but they don't lend themselves to speed, in fact quite the opposite. For this project I had to condense months into a week and, thanks to the wonderful print work of Stuart Keegan, managed to do that. Phew!

The format of the show is the final part of the experience I really like. Prints hung by fish wire and bulldog clips it appeals to my sense of how photography doesn't need to follow traditional gallery practice. Making it accessible in such a way that doesn't undermine the work but removes barriers to viewers, both mentally and physically, is really important to me. In fact it's one of the attractions of using new technology to create work that appeals to me.

That's how I like it. Beginnings not endings.

ambiguous redux

My inclusion in fLIP's on the streets edition gave me a kickstart to re-join my local group. I attended my last meeting in 2005 so it was a bit of a rip van winkle moment when I stumbled back in.

The timing of my (re)arrival became more propitious when we started talking about a new opportunity for the group to exhibit a sequence of images created by each photographer responding to the picture before to create a chain of apparently random but connected images. In one of those lovely moments of serendipity that street photography seems to cultivate I happened to have a copy of Ambiguous with me.  

Nice to see the idea have another life.  

Bit like me. 

give my regards to broadway

I'm really pleased to see the Museum of London's survey of London street photography has now transferred to the Museum of New York City. For me it's the return leg of a journey that started back in the 80s when I began to take pictures in Manhattan in a style that I only later understood was street photography.

Since then my theatre of operations has been pretty much London, with the occasional tour to continental Europe and beyond, but the the city has reverted to what it was before I lived there a long time ago...a constant influence through music, film and literature but also not so much a physical place, dare I say it, more a New York state of mind.

So my images in the show feel like a homage in two ways. One to the birthplace of a style of photography that portrays the individual in a city in a struggling to assert their identity. The other a postcard, "Wish I was there"!

Museum of London street photography show - countdown begins

Well, the Museum of London's street photography exhibition opens this week and I'm really looking forward to it. Highlighting our city’s rich tradition of street photography, one that is as distinctive as Paris or New York, is long overdue. This survey, in the setting of the Museum, is a perfect place to consider what the images reveal of London's social history. It's fantastic this form of photography has risen in popularity in recent years but I hope the presentation of contemporary images alongside those of Paul Trevor’s will make us stop and think what a street photograph can actually be, as well as others by Paul Martin will serve as a reminder of its roots.

As for my own work I am intrigued how it will be presented. Despite being a proud Londoner one of the characteristics of my photographs is how ambiguous they are in term of location and, to some extent, time as well. However I can testify the main image selected for the show is from 1989, taken in London's West End!

There will also be some of my more recent work projected as part of a sequence of contemporary London street photography.

I love how the show had broadened its appeal, curating work via The Big Issue and Metro, and stimulating debate on the merits of The Ted Heath Orchestra versus The Cheeky Girls as soundtracks to some of the show's photographs. I sincerely hope the programme of supporting events over the summer makes the most of this attention and delivers an international impact as well as one, to use a popular phrase, which establishes a legacy to Londoners.

on show - Museum of London

I've been invited to show one of my images at the Museum of London's London Street Photography exhibition opening next February. It's a fantastic honour as, obviously, London is so close to my heart and the Museum, in particular, is one of my special places.

The image selected was made around 1989 which, in retrospect, was a really productive period of my work. Post-NYC, pre-children I had the luxury of time, but no money, to indulge myself coming to terms with my return to London.



It's ironic in that one comment made of my pictures is how hard it is to identify their location and date. For me that's as much about our pre-conceptions of how images of London, or contemporary London for that matter, should look, so I'm really intrigued to see mine in the context of a historical survey.