I think I’ve more or less got over being a street photographer, though I work most of the time on the street, if anything I do think of myself as a ‘post-street’ photographer. Been there, done that, eventually got bored.
Hatton Garden
Of course I’m not being entirely serious. What I’m really bored with is people who think of themselves as somehow radical because they are ‘street photographers’ and are wandering around producing very third rate images. As Mitch Alland puts it in his
An Approach to Street Photography on the Online Photographer site:
“without a purpose, street photography can be meaningless, particularly if the pictures don’t have any graphic distinction: how many times have you seen on the internet humdrum photos of street people, of old men sitting on benches, that say nothing either socially or graphically?“
Amen. Recently in Britain we’ve seen far too many people claiming to have invented the wheel and making it far too square for my taste.
As Alland goes on to say, “even photographers that have no experience in street photography can do it when they have a purpose and a reason for doing it” and also talks a little about the kinds of techniques he find useful. I was particularly interested in his description of how he works when using the small-sensor Ricoh GR Digital II, using the LCD to roughly establish the edges of the frame but looking at the subject when pressing the shutter.
The discussion that followed the posting also brings out some interesting points, but rather than pursue that here, I thought I’d just post a fairly random selection of pictures. Some might be street.
Notting Hill Market
Weston-super-Mare 1
Weston-super-Mare 2
Oxford Street
Manor Park
Soho
Brixton
Edgware Road
Peckham
I don’t know if everyone would think of all of these as street photography, and I don’t greatly care. They were all scenes that interested me in some way at the time I made the picture. None were set up, all taken in an intuitive manner, “on the run“, with a brief glimpse at the viewfinder – or, in a couple of cases just relying on my experience of what a 28mm lens would show.