a black and white life

When I think of why I have devoted my work to black and white and not colour street photography, I must acknowledge the significance of my childhood spent in the flicker of black and white television. Absorbing those images not only gave me a view of the world outside, they gave me a way of interpreting it.

Black and white was drama: it told me stories, it made me laugh, it brought me to tears. Images played in my mind in black and white...I'm sure I dreamed in black and white too! The composition, framing and sequence of those stories beat a path into my subconscious.
For me colour was a wrapper, black and white was the real stuff, there when you dug your nails beneath the surface.

It's not that I haven't had dalliances outside my relationship with black and white.

I've used a cameraphone to experience the immediacy of the taken image, there in the palm of my hand. My technique transferred easily enough. However I found colour in itself wasn't a significant element, a red flag to my senses. What I did discover was that, no longer driven by the sunlight and shadow that saturates my black and white work, I was at liberty to explore flat grey days as well as interior public spaces.

The results for me didn't have the same engagement, soul even, as my black and white work, but stepping outside my usual way of working tapped into something different. Watch this space!

chasing pavements

I was in two minds about the style of my last street photography book loved; life; London. I wanted to reflect the energy and randomness of the street. I also wanted to focus attention purely on the images and their sequence, not on the design of the pages, as this was the essence of that particular body of work. I decided to publish them in a more formal, traditional design but it left me with an ambition to create something that made more of the qualities of a book and also the interest of a reader.

Creating a book based on this website, where I've examined why I do what I do, felt like a natural next step. Street photography for me is not purely about the final image. The act of taking them is an expression of my feelings about the city and how we conduct ourselves on its streets. I've reflected that in a layout with a variety of picture size and crop, some of my own text and other visual ideas.

Portrait of a Street Photographer is more an impression than a documentary. It's not a life story, just a snapshot.

single lens reflex

Looking through the viewfinder wasn't working for me. The pictures I took were too static. Stopping to raise the camera to my eye took me out of the flow of the street and I wanted a way of working that meant I could stay immersed in it, observing from within.

What came more naturally to me was using the camera simply as an extension of my arm. I used it at waist level, above my head, behind my back. The pictures weren't random. I was responding to images forming before my eyes. I relied on footwork, timing and hand-eye coordination to take the picture as I approached, passed and moved on.

It was incredibly liberating, exhilarating. I could move to the rhythm of the street, creating sequences of images like musical notes on a manuscript. I discovered perspectives and compositions that genuinely excited me, images that were far closer to the emotions I felt on the street then anything I'd taken before.

Using film I never see what I've taken until it has been processed, contacted and then printed. Back in New York I was desperate to see the results as soon as possible but over time the distance between conception and birth has become longer, yes up to nine months sometimes! This gap is significant. It means I can sustain the sensation of seeing the picture, the thrill of finding something in the everyday that no-one else has. The value of that moment is not immediately judged by the success or not of capturing it, That act is something separate, something squirrelled away for the future in a dark place,

When the picture eventually sees the light of day again it is transformed. The memory of the original moment itself is gone. Now it is reborn as an image in its own right, with no obligation to the day it was conceived. I give it no name. Its identity is given by the viewer. The image now finds its own way in the world. And I like that!

ways of walking?

I chose the title "Ways of Walking" for my original street photography website as it expressed two particular ideas: the style or state in which we walk, for example oblivious, alert, cautious, careless; but also the routes we take such as pre-determined journeys to work or more serendipitous ones when we have the luxury of time to follow something that captures our attention, a fragrance, a face, a memory.

In recent years I have found myself blurring the planned and random nature of my walks around London. The area I am most fascinated by is the West End, in particular the streets roughly bounded to the north around Oxford Street, to the east by Kingsway, the south by the Embankment and to the west at Park Lane. Within that boundary the direction I take is initially driven by the position of the sun. Staring at the sky above Centrepoint I sometimes think I'm as acutely aware of the weather, the change of light of chasing clouds, as any landscape or wildlife photographer.

Once the direction, west to east along Piccadilly for example, is set then it's a question of timing. Lunchtime affords an opportunity for a hasty assignation between office workers outside Green Park; a language school spills out onto Shaftesbury Avenue between classes, the students a synthesis of world cultures; an eddy around the news stand outside Leicester Square tube at a sign of the first edition of the day's Evening Standard.

Lately I've taken to Regents Street. I love its curve and breadth. The consistency of the style and height of the buildings are unusual for a London street. Its alignment, a bit north/south, a little east/west, means the sunlight can always find some stretch of pavement to illuminate. It also culminates at Oxford Circus, a wonderful gateway to one of the major arteries of London, nourished by the underground station's stairways recycling bodies in and out. This makes it sound like an amorphous mass of people but I feel that the architecture here doesn't diminish the individual and there is still an intimacy about this place that keeps me coming back.

Auerbach's building sites, the mountains of London

The current Frank Auerbach show at The Courtauld Gallery, London Building Sites 1952-1962, portrays a London literally rebuilding itself post-war. The series of paintings depict building sites around central London including John Lewis in Oxford Street, the Shell building at the South Bank and the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square.

 

Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962, Frank Auerbach

I was fascinated by the exhibition's title, an exception to my received impression of the usual ones there e.g. Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests. Portraying the primal scene of the birth of buildings, that point where the ground is literally broken, in thick, viscous oil paint in such a traditional gallery was a contrast I liked.

Granted the location of these buildings was influential and reminded me, in my own lifetime, of the appearance and disappearance of buildings, streets even: "a heaving, bubbling, cauldron" as Auerbach said.

He characterises London in this post war period in a wonderfully evocative phrase "...(it) was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountains and crags, full of drama" and this series is on first look more representative of Mars than Earth, let alone London. Red, ochre and umber saturate the paintings' surfaces. It's a primal, alien experience yet a human element, although not immediately evident, is a definite presence. It takes me to my other interest in this portrayal of London at this particular point in its history which is more personal.

My father, as an immigrant from Ireland in the 1950s, represents the hidden hands behind so much of what shapes the architecture of modern London. Although not directly involved in the building sites represented here, his compatriots were. Looking at these paintings, at the occasional glimpse of a silhouette, gave me a sense of connection to him and to the London he would have experienced. Another quote from Auerbach: "...(there was a) sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city… and a sort of curious freedom… I remember a feeling of camaraderie among the people in the street”.

It also made me reflect on the current renewal of the centre of London courtesy of the Crossrail project. I'd like to think there's an artist working now in the same vein, recording the birth of another landmark in the depths of the mountains and crags of Charing Cross Road.