237 - Pink Reality
Window shopping with an iPhone got me into street photography. I just got into the habit of taking pictures as I strolled around, and I became curious.
There was a book just published in 2011, called 'Street Photography Now' and it had a community project associated with it: the Street Photography Now Project - run in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery, London, and Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of the book. The idea was for a respected street photographer to issue an instruction once a week to challenge novices. It might be 'get out of your comfort zone' or 'discover something discarded'. Everyone would take a picture and upload it to a dedicated group on Flickr (the main social site for photography at the time).
From there, I followed pointers to the group Hardcore Street Photography on Flickr . I rushed in and submitted photos to their [we don't suffer fools gladly] crit thread. I hung out there for months. It was like a free university course on photography. I learnt so much. Just an example of how naive I was: someone had photographed a man jumping over a puddle in Hyde Park and I didn't get the reference. But I eventually got to understand their definition of street photography "candid situations that momentarily reveal themselves amidst the mundane hustle and bustle of everyday life". It really took a long time to understand. I come at things from more of a fine art point of view - where you create the reality. SP is more about channelling reality somehow.
I like this excerpt from the SP Now Project intro (linked to above):
"...street photographers elevate the commonplace and familiar into something mythical and even heroic. They thrive on the unexpected, seeing the street as a theatre of endless possibilities..."
Below, is something I wrote back in January 2011. I think if I go back out again, I will get more into the portraiture aspect - that is eye contact with people and talking to them.
------
Overall I was quite happy with the street vendor photos for a first go. I love the way the tumbling toys look like exotic insects. And they emphasise the surface of the glass. This is one of the first photos where I started looking at a vertical line between two versions of the world: staged and constructed versus organic and random.
Ali was a great character, I found him really fascinating as a performer in his job. He had a way of putting people at their ease whilst at the same time, distracting and enticing their kids to spend pocket money. But there was this carnival atmosphere on the street, everyone uplifted by the lights and the spangle. The vibe was so good. At the same time there was a certain resignation about Ali. He was a bit world weary. Probably ready to put his feet up with a cigar or something. So this made me more interested in him as a subject. The fixed smile of the pink stuffed toy in the centre says it all, well maybe not all but passes comment.
So Ali put me at my ease - ish. I'm still quite nervous about that one-to-one engagement with a person when I'm in the process of making something. Same thing with painting portraits. I'm uneasy with staring at someone so intently and they're generally uneasy with being stared at.
------
One of the biggest things I learned was how much your own emotion and memory (from the moment you took the photo), influences how you see that photo. It's huge. If you felt excited and engaged, you imagine you have an exciting and engaging photo. No. The difficulty of deciding whether the a photo has any worth, seems inverse to how easy it is to press the shutter button. The other meter that's wrong is the effort meter. Conversely, when it is hard to press the shutter button - you made a lot of effort - you think the result must be good. A sort of pay back. No.
Here are some of the pictures I took at that beginning time (click to view larger).