An Ode to Street Photography & Street Photographers
I rarely stay still on the streets. Agitated, I move with the sway of the crowd, snapping my shutter to their momentum.
Staying still, waiting for the action is simply not part of my affect. Boredom takes hold. I fidget, my mind wanders. Traipsing around London, I avoid these pitfalls, instead forcing my mind to only engage with what next I am seeing, I allow myself to see.
Composition falls from the forefront of my mind. Shooting street, I have a total disregard and disdain for the entire concept. My pics are chopped, skewed, an anti-composition. Form fights content, and invariably, form loses. What I gain is outside the structural limitations of composition.
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Yet, first I stilled myself shooting buildings. Architectural photography became my first love. The first subject I could engage in safely, without consciousness. Buildings don't shout back. Lines are inherent, buildings remain stationary. Symmetry and balance are all there for the taking. I could obsessively count windows to align to the building's midpoint, study how best to fill the frame, where the negative space would influence the emotion conveyed by these inanimate monoliths.
I repeated this with such frequency and obsession that it became second nature, the repeat visits reducing with each cycle of my burgeoning workflow. I did this until I ran out of buildings to shoot in London. Eventually, I lowered my camera down seeking facades, and while that briefly satisfied, I needed something else.
Something without the symphonic structural constraints of architectural photography. As these constraints weighed heavy, the freedoms of street photography became increasingly irresistible. I eschewed what I’d learnt about composition to shoot purely street.
Shooting street felt like jazz. The old cliche of jazz, or rather the old misunderstanding of jazz is that each band member plays to their own accord, keen to express solely their tune, their voice. Yet if that were true, there would lie cacophony. For all its virtuosity and freedom, without structure, there is no music.
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I feel integral to the scene when moving to the rhythm of the crowd. I'm not as bold as some to create the scene, nor do avoid its bruising, and so, as I gesticulate and forget myself, clockers regularly feature in my pics. The photographer’s eye is analogous to the jazz musician’s ear - forever seeking the next note, the next movement. It is the jazz mindset that does not await permission to join the music.
After making the switch, I would suddenly spot street photographers not hiding in plain sight. I was mesmerised as I watched the current crop of seasoned street photographers shamelessly shooting people, being watched shooting people, seen by those shot. They practiced a boldness I could not comprehend, a leap I knew though that I too had to take if I wanted to class myself as a street photographer.
After those experiences, I pointed my camera away from the skies, and towards people, towards faces. I felt like I had suddenly plugged into an art form that was undergoing its most recent iteration. I would hit the streets multiple times a month, often twice weekly, and on back to back days.
Today, on the streets I often forget myself. Daily anxieties trivialise. Existential angst irrelevant. My immediate surroundings, the people, their movements dictated my next action. I become thoughtless in the gloriously literal sense - feeling only within the milliseconds of my consciousness.
Street photography not only saved my life, it gave me a reason to live.
I arrived late into street photography. Where previously my life revolved around measurable results, I longed for a creative, qualitative life. That transition happened with a cost. Nothing worth while changes without consequences, and so I consider myself privileged to have made the leap. I have been blessed to have carved a career in photography late on in my life, shooting a variety of fields, but at my core, I am a street photographer.