portrait of a street photograph, part 2

Well I've made an edit of the images from Barcelona which, on a cold, dark day in London, is a welcome tonic! One of the consequences of the gestation of my work is an appreciation not only of the passage of time but of season in particular. The scraps of sunshine in the winter city are both a promise of days to come and a reminder of the capriciousness I'm at the mercy of.

I'm really happy the potential mise-en-scene of the contact sheet I was particularly occupied by has been realised. This is a first for me! I've left out the don't go back ingredient of my own recipe for street photography. Before now my experience has been that I can never beat that initial, gut response to a possible picture. Any second attempts become 3T: too thought through. 

On this occasion I managed to keep the spontaneity of the first contact and, by turning the dance of the street to my advantage, come away with two images that both stand alone and together.

Hope the London saying about waiting for a bus for a long time and then two come along together will be true for me. Twenty years will be a long time to wait for another such opportunity!

See more sunshine here.

Evelyn Hofer, a great photographer

I was fortunate over the holidays to drop in to my favourite second hand book shop. A while back I came across an original catalogue for the Family of Man exhibition so I always cross its threshold with a lovely sense of possibility, often dissipated. On this occasion however I found real treasure. Not a great rarity but a book whose cover had really made an impression on me when I saw it first time around, a monograph of Evelyn Hofer. 

With the luxury of looking at it at home and not furtively in a shop I was really absorbed by her images of Dublin in the sixties. A place and time with resonance in my own life. Despite appearances to the contrary I do enjoy colour photography. The particular light evoked in those images so integral to their representation of time and place I can only stand and stare. The portraits anonymous, for the most part, but complicit. Subjects soulful.

Girl with Bicycle, Dublin 1966, Evelyn Hofer

Her work is so wonderful and so largely unknown that, not for the first time, I wonder how quickly we rush to form a view on the Canon of Great Photographers. It's human nature of course. We all need our Top Ten songs, film stars...paint names [no? maybe that's just me].

There's the occasional Vivian Maier to upset the status quo but there is so much great work to discover and enjoy. Not every photograph that can be taken has been taken! Or at least found.

In the meantime I'll keep riffling through the shelves of pre-loved books, open for persuasion.

turning for home

Since my last post in July the scope of the Ambiguous Book Project has entered uncharted territory. I've found it fascinating how we've moved out of the urban, through the suburban, beyond countryside into wilderness.

As we approach the fiftieth, that's right 50th, image of the sequence we're almost home but I'm sure not without some more twists before we're done.

In the meantime I've been thinking of how the book can be formatted and structured. In this instance the primary challenges of any book, the edit and the sequence, have already been taken care of. The very nature of Ambiguous means every image is included and they will each be presented in relationship to the one they respond to. In that sense all I'll need to do is click Get Photos then Autoflow and, ladies and gentlemen, my work is done. It's certainly an attractive option. I've taken an invisible hand to the project so far, gently nudging it on its path since launch back in February. 

However this collection of images is becoming such a wonderful resource I just wonder, I just wonder...

In keeping with the spirit of the essential ambiguity of photographs I toy with an idea made famous by David Bailey's Box of Pin-Ups. A loose, unbound collection of prints that can be seen in any sequence the viewer chooses. Willfully perverse though it may seem I find there's something in the idea of literally throwing Ambiguous up in the air and letting the viewer take a treasure hunt approach to join the images together as they fall...Yes? No? I think it's one I'll have to save for another day unless Blurb suddenly add this to their ever expanding list of publishing options. Why they may even have a Direct From Facebook one soon...wait a minute, what's this?

Hold on to your hats. Can we complete the project by next February to meet it's first birthday? I certainly hope so!

 

portrait of a street photograph, part 1

I'm about to embark on a selection of images from some recent work from Barcelona and thought you might like to come along for the ride.

First stop is the contact sheet. Click on it for a bigger version.

On first take the contact sheet represents a chaotic, random way of working. I'd like to think there's method in my madness. For me facing the moment I originally took the photograph is one part of my work that has noticeably changed over time. At first it was a time of high expectation, regularly dashed on the rocks of my ambition. Over time as I've put more time between taking and printing images my attitude has become more sanguine, an appreciation of each moment on its own merit.

The Barcelona work is interesting as I've a clear memory of the circumstances surrounding a number of the images. The sequence I've latched onto from the particular contact sheet above is one revolving, literally, around an argument in the street between a young man and woman.

The street at the time was relatively empty so I was keen to be unobtrusive, not for any great ethical motivation, but to try to get as close as possible. The result is two frames, 14 & 17, of the event, spliced by two others where I was moving around it. Intriguingly these four images, presented as they are on the contact sheet, become a sequence themselves related not just by time and space but something, for me at least, more evocative, almost cinematic.

I'll explore this in the next part of the process. Can't say what that'll be yet as I don't know myself!

street view people view

I'm been struck by the parallel debates about privacy on the internet and on the street. Central to both arenas is the image of the individual, the rights of its ownership and distribution.

The rise in popularity of street photography has brought fresh attention to the practice of taking pictures of people without explicit permission. On the web the ongoing debate over privacy is regularly fuelled by the latest Facebook feature or expansion of Google Street View.

There is already technological convergence between the street and the screen. Face recognition to optimise the identification of criminals by cctv is also marketed more benignly to find friends in party photos posted online.

This debate is not new. The tension between individual and state as played out on the street has been reflected in literature, often in a dystopic future. From George Orwell's 1984 to Will Self's Book of Dave a vision of Londoners is portrayed living with the consequences of the gradual relinquishing of our privacy.

My most recent collection of photographs, Between the City and the City, explores an idea of parallel experience, how we each live together alone in the city, our faces more like façades. It now forms the backdrop for a new book, Street View People View, that develops the relationship of our faces and the ownership of their image.

The title of the book has been on my mind for a while. It seemed, for me at least, a logical next step in the enhancement of the digital documentation of public spaces to that of the people within those spaces. We can already identify our friends' physical location courtesy of mobile phone apps. Enhancing that visually would be neat wouldn't it? Imagine scanning a crowd with an augmented reality app that highlights those individuals. Cool.The anonymous crowd, familiar to the street photographer as the human zoo, now becomes a photo gallery of individuals, instantly profiled and packaged. Science or fiction?

As with my earlier books, Portrait of a Street Photographer and The Distance Between Us, I've thought about how those particularly wonderful characteristics of a book could be used to express these ideas. Consequently I've found myself breaking some of my own taboos.

I was looking for a way of simply illustrating the book's title. One design idea I tried was alternating the sequence of images with upside down cropped versions of each picture, including two separate front covers. The not-so-simple idea was the book could be experienced as a set of "street views" in landscape format and "people views" in portrait format. I liked the intention but the execution was a little laboured. I did however, whisper this, like the cropping so I kept that and tried another approach.

I've shied away from captioning my images in the past but I wanted to refer to the ideas that lay behind the book. Including quotes from press releases, novels and news stories satisfied that. Granted not a particularly original idea - I think Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip was the first time I saw this technique.

I considered really ramming the idea home with speech-bubbles above each figure's head with sample personal details. However I wanted to retain the feel of the images as pure street photographs and not interfere with them directly. This literal sub-text is then there as something for the viewer to consider as a separate but related element, more like a collage.

Finally I chose not to include any rationale in the book itself, This is exclusive to this site!

Street View People View felt like an opportunity to reflect on my own work, and the city I live in, and to consider street photography in a broader context in which it may be practised in the near future, coming to a corner near you soon...