Street Pictures: Top 30
30 images Created 26 Feb 2013
Nothing Out of the Ordinary.
I have been taking pictures on the street for 25 years and only stumbled upon the term 'street photography' after a period messing around with aviation projects some years ago. It never occurred to me that by simply reporting the ordinary in the documentary tradition, it had another new title within Photography. It felt as if I’d missed the flight.
My pictures aren’t trying to sell any product and endorse brand London. Instead, they’re largely absurd, dystopian, quirky reactions that confront the interests of pseudo-public landowners.
The privatisation of public space (glass castles patrolled by hi-vis pikemen) are mapped with rows of pavement studs marking corporate no-mans lands. Their default position is to say you’re on private land and to push off but they’re largely protecting their own job rather than the property, so are clueless when taken off-script.
Exploring a city can make one insecure, to say the least. And discovering one’s own relationship with its noisy, pacey, anonymity brings on paranoia and delusion that lurks within the optimism of taking good pictures in an urban locale. Every journey is a chance; a high-risk business that often yields little. None of the certainties liked by bankers.
Rebecca Solnit likens the walking speed of city flâneurs (wanderers) to ‘the mind at 3 miles an hour’ and I like labouring on routes which manipulate random encounters: So when a journey itself helps contrive the coincidence between people, a background, a shadow and me. I don’t fret about missing something I haven’t seen but getting to that place in the universe by some sort of astrological collision of time and space, is a daily ambition.
Each spontaneous choice governs what karmic snapshots are made. Do I turn left, or right – or cross the river to go home? The people I encounter may be locals or tourists, runaways or pickpockets. Pepys, Dickens and Virginia Wolf all sauntered obsessively through their own eras of London and Kierkegaard said that during his tours of Copenhagen he was, ‘studying his human subjects - urban botanising’.
I still see my younger self on many street corners - a young man still to be a father, and still to make many images that will define him.
This slow, meditative form of reportage is an antidote to high-speed browsing but it can still be exhausting. And when that mental and visual fog eventually sets in, get the coffee in and take a window seat.
A large set of 400 can be seen at: http://bit.ly/fxVIZi
I have been taking pictures on the street for 25 years and only stumbled upon the term 'street photography' after a period messing around with aviation projects some years ago. It never occurred to me that by simply reporting the ordinary in the documentary tradition, it had another new title within Photography. It felt as if I’d missed the flight.
My pictures aren’t trying to sell any product and endorse brand London. Instead, they’re largely absurd, dystopian, quirky reactions that confront the interests of pseudo-public landowners.
The privatisation of public space (glass castles patrolled by hi-vis pikemen) are mapped with rows of pavement studs marking corporate no-mans lands. Their default position is to say you’re on private land and to push off but they’re largely protecting their own job rather than the property, so are clueless when taken off-script.
Exploring a city can make one insecure, to say the least. And discovering one’s own relationship with its noisy, pacey, anonymity brings on paranoia and delusion that lurks within the optimism of taking good pictures in an urban locale. Every journey is a chance; a high-risk business that often yields little. None of the certainties liked by bankers.
Rebecca Solnit likens the walking speed of city flâneurs (wanderers) to ‘the mind at 3 miles an hour’ and I like labouring on routes which manipulate random encounters: So when a journey itself helps contrive the coincidence between people, a background, a shadow and me. I don’t fret about missing something I haven’t seen but getting to that place in the universe by some sort of astrological collision of time and space, is a daily ambition.
Each spontaneous choice governs what karmic snapshots are made. Do I turn left, or right – or cross the river to go home? The people I encounter may be locals or tourists, runaways or pickpockets. Pepys, Dickens and Virginia Wolf all sauntered obsessively through their own eras of London and Kierkegaard said that during his tours of Copenhagen he was, ‘studying his human subjects - urban botanising’.
I still see my younger self on many street corners - a young man still to be a father, and still to make many images that will define him.
This slow, meditative form of reportage is an antidote to high-speed browsing but it can still be exhausting. And when that mental and visual fog eventually sets in, get the coffee in and take a window seat.
A large set of 400 can be seen at: http://bit.ly/fxVIZi
