John Lewell

Getting Faces in Big Close-Up, Candidly

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Let’s be candid. It’s not easy to take close-up photos of people’s faces when they’re walking towards you in the street. Here are four reasons why that’s so:

1. It’s too rude to shove your camera in a stranger’s face.
2. People will see you taking the shot and react adversely.
3. It’s hard to get focus when a person is approaching you.
4. If you attempt it at a distance you’ll need a telephoto.

Let me take these in turn.

1. It’s too rude to shove your camera in a stranger’s face.
I agree entirely. I’d be cross if someone shoved a camera directly into my face while I’m walking along a public street, wouldn’t you? This really isn’t an acceptable strategy for the street photographer. Apart from being rude, it doesn’t get very good results.

2. People will see you taking the shot and react adversely.
Strangers know when they’re “on camera,” so they look directly into the lens and scowl, or else they look away or take evasive action. Is this the kind of reaction you want to photograph? You can say “yes,” but it’s not candid street photography. The story is no longer about them, it’s about your interference in their lives.

3. It’s hard to get focus when a person is approaching you.
Yes, it’s difficult but not impossible, given the sophisticated focus tracking systems on today’s cameras. However, switching from normal mode to auto-tracking is adding complication to an already complex task. Even an experienced sports photographer, accustomed to auto-tracking, may have a problem trying to implement it on the street.

4. If you attempt it at a distance you’ll need a telephoto.
That’s certainly one option, but there are huge disadvantages to using telephoto lenses in street photography. People will shout “Hey, look, there’s a pap!” and give you a wide berth. (Pap = paparazzo, a freelance photographer who pursues celebrities). It will also stop you from taking shots discreetly, closer to the action.

Most street photographers switch themselves out of “candid mode” and enter what is sometimes called “conversational mode.” This is the tried and tested method of chatting to the subject to ask if they mind having their picture taken. Does it yield great photos? You bet it does! You get interesting faces, perfect framing, sharp focus — the whole works. But it’s not candid.

Once you leave out the candid element in street photography you’ve lost its soul.

So maybe we should simply pack it in, go home, and leave the big facial close-up to the portrait photographer. After all, there are plenty of other compositions to explore. It’s not absolutely essential to include large, candid facial close-ups in your street photography portfolio.

My Solution
Don’t give up too easily! There’s always a way of getting the job done — and I don’t think you need to resort to really sneaky tactics like concealing your camera in a briefcase or under a coat.

I took all the pictures in this blog post by sitting in cafés, enjoying a nice cup of cappuccino in the afternoon. This is frowned upon in Italy where no one drinks cappuccino after lunch. Macchiato yes, marocchino OK, but cappuccino — “stai scherzando!” (You must be kidding!)

The Images
The featured image (above) and the two below make a nice set because I took them all from exactly the same angle, with the same lighting. Looking at them today I keep wondering why I didn’t take more. The light was excellent and I had the ideal position near a corner — one that would probably be occupied by another customer if I returned to the same place.

One snag was the fact that people didn’t often walk close to the window, so I couldn’t get focus consistently. To take these images I had to pre-set the focus and wait for someone to pass at a specific distance from the camera. A second snag was the lack of people in the Suffolk market town I was visiting, not at all like the huddled masses I’m more accustomed to in London.

Nonetheless, I like these images because I so rarely succeed in getting large, candid close-ups of people’s faces. Although they’re not “full frontal” they’re clearly of people walking at speed in front of the camera — without being interrupted by the presence of the photographer.

I tried the same technique in Bangkok, where the late afternoon sun illuminated people’s faces with sufficient intensity to allow me to use a fast shutter speed. When you can’t pan the camera you need to have a fast shutter setting to freeze the movement of people walking past.

I’m not as happy with the result as I am with the pictures I took in England. Maybe it was the coffee! The trouble was, I couldn’t get close enough to the passers-by because of the notice board. Lacking glass, the café made me highly visible so the notice board was important, but still…

There are other faults, too. The colour of the setting sun was a bit too intense and the woman is not in tack-sharp focus. (That’s what can happen when you have the aperture wide open.) Yet for all its faults it’s not a bad image. I like the woman’s quiet strength and dignity. When you get a picture that shows human qualities such as these you know it’s worth keeping.

Finding Colour Harmonies

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Unless you shoot in black and white you have to pay attention to colour and its ability to make or break your images.

Individually, colours may be loud or quiet. Collectively they sometimes shout at each other and at times they coo in harmony like contented pigeons on a summer’s afternoon.

You can’t just ignore colour and hope for the best. Out there on the streets you’ll find people wearing garishly coloured costumes, or carrying brightly coloured bags or sporting multi-coloured hairstyles in various shades of lurid. You will often find your great composition has been ruined by a coloured hat (dress/bag/hair-do) popping up in the wrong place.

The Colour of Light
When I go out to take pictures my first thought is about colour. Or, to be accurate, I think first about the light and its influence on colours we perceive. Is it a grey day when everything will assume soft tones, lacking contrast and colour intensity? Or is it intermittently sunny and shady, with sunlight cutting through the cloud, bouncing off other clouds and making colour all the more brilliant?

If the light is too intense I tend to move inside a covered area, like a shopping mall. The alternative is to wait until early evening, when a yellowish glow pervades the scene outside. I figure: I can always tone it down slightly in Photoshop. I’m not a great fan of images that appear too warm.

Colour temperature (the measure of the colour of light, from cool, bluish white to warm yellow and red) adds a distinctive colour cast to the world, but we’re not always aware of it. A sheet of notepaper appears white in a New York morning — and still appears white in Miami at sundown. It appears that way because we know what a sheet of white paper is supposed to look like. Only if we start to think about it — and begin to look critically — can we detect the difference.

Colours Unleashed
When the colour balance of your photo is just right (not too warm and not too chilly) the actual colours of the subject can become more, rather than less, unruly. This is because they no longer have the unifying presence of a colour cast, which subdues them into submission by turning them all slightly yellow or blue. Now the reds can fight with the greens, like Nigeria playing Ghana in the FIFA World Cup.

If you don’t want your colours to be unruly you have to look for scenes where they harmonise. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of them.

Colours live in harmony when they sit next to each other on the “colour wheel,” (so-called “analagous colour schemes”). You can make more vibrant harmonies by including colours that group in triadic fashion — taking them from three points of an equilateral triangle overlaid on the colour wheel.

Otherwise, find harmonies within gradations of the same colour, mixed in with a similar range of tones in the above combinations.

Seeing Colours on the Street
In practice, you, the street photographer, are never going to ask: “Am I looking at triadic colours?” when a good subject moves into view. Rather, you develop a knack for seeing harmonies where they exist and finding the right subject within them.

Taken in a mall, my featured image (above) is called “Teenage Pink” and I considered using it for a blog post about “single colour dominance.” I’m glad I didn’t, because here I’ve found so many gradations of pink — together with the yellow on the right of the frame — that I can’t say it’s a “single colour” image. The colours harmonise, as they do in my next image (below).

Reds and browns harmonise beautifully, but you also need a lighter colour to brighten the image. In this shot of three women cleaning a restaurant window I was lucky the subjects had white tunics. White is neutral and it matches the colour of the chefs’ outfits and that of the plates and jars on the tables. On scrutinising the image I can see that the woman on the right appears to be rubbing out my own image which is reflected in the glass.

It’s possible that your style of photography is not dependent on colour harmony. Neither is mine, but I enjoy it when I discover a subject where harmonious colours are present. It’s like finding an unusual, red coloured pebble on the beach: not especially rare, but it’s what catches your eye amidst all the yellowish stones surrounding it.

I find that older people often dress in harmonious colours whereas children are given loud discordant colours to wear. I’m always hoping that some enterprising entrepreneur will start selling “tasteful clothes for children,” but I’m not holding my breath over it. In the image below, everything is reasonably harmonious except for the little boy’s shoes.

The photo looks more peaceful if I crop it heavily, but then you can see that the 1/200th shutter speed was not quite fast enough to freeze the movement of the old lady’s hand. (I remember her placing it in position just as I pressed the shutter button).

I suppose I could dispense with the child and see how Granma looks on her own next to the drying tee-shirts. Not at all bad! But I’ve lost the wonderful skirt, the colourful stools, the bicycle and the sleepy child — not to mention the Thai flag.

In Summary
In street photography we have very limited control over colour because we have to photograph what’s there in the real world. In the photo of the lady and her grandchild I could scarcely ask her to remove the boy’s shoes in the interests of colour harmony. I’d come across these two people by chance in a Bangkok side street and the shot was entirely candid.

Getting colours that are both harmonious and vivid is especially hard. You need good light, clean air, and a subject with the right combination of hues and tones. Muted shades are easier — and it’s best if you exclude toys, fruit, traffic cops, groceries, Chinese restaurants, sweet wrappers, uniformed street cleaners — or anything that tries to attract attention with clashing colours.

Good luck with that.

The Joy of Ladders

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For the street photographer, ladders — or, rather, workers on ladders — are a tempting subject but they pose some tricky technical problems. Let me start by exploring why they’re so tempting.

Ladders are highly symbolic. Even though we use them for going down holes as well as climbing up buildings, they’re symbolic of ascent, ambition, and striving. To a practical person they’re an excellent means of reaching a blocked gutter, but to the fanciful mind they’re a stairway to heaven. For these people and everyone else they’re all about raising yourself about the heads of the crowd — to a place where they have to look up to you.

In Britain, I get the impression that there’s also a class connotation. The ladder is symbolic of the “working man.” Certainly I know many people who’d never consider climbing a ladder for that very reason. Gentlemen are already superior — the unspoken argument goes — so why on Earth would they need to go up a ladder?

I’m not of that view. Last summer I painted the front of my three-storey home, replacing the painter who, having accepted the job, took a second look and said: “I don’t fancy climbing up there.” Although I felt somewhat inconvenienced (several other firms failed to respond), I really enjoyed the task and I ended up saving enough money to purchase any one of the cameras on my list of  “The 10 Best Cameras for Street Photography — and Why.”

Matching Bags
I was already thinking about ladders when I took my featured image (above), as I’ll explain later. I spotted it from a distance and wondered if could get it into shot at a point when the two pairs of women passed each other in the street. I knew there would just be a pair of feet showing, but I guessed they would add some visual interest at the top of the picture.

As it turned out, there was a ton of visual interest in the foreground subjects. The pair on the right are walking so close together they overlap, one of them leaning slightly to the left which greatly helps the composition. And what can I say about the other two? They bear little resemblance to each other in their style of dress except for two items: boots and bags. The bags are identical, which makes their dissimilar dress even more remarkable.

Does the picture have a “meaning”? I’m a great believer in the idea that street photography should concentrate on form. My mantra is: “Concentrate on Form; Content and Meaning Will Follow.” In this case, as I mentioned, I was already thinking about ladders. Two minutes previously (see the EXIF) I’d taken the candid image below:

As revealed by the wording on the door, the big picture in the window is an enlargement of a photograph by Clive Boursnell, famed for “capturing Covent Garden in pictures for over 50 years.” How times have changed! His black and white film photo of a man on a ladder, with a copy of a newspaper sticking out of a jacket pocket, is one that shouts “working class.” It’s a lovely shot: very jaunty and evocative of the cheerful way in which Londoners go about their work. (You can see the whole of the image on Clive Boursnell’s website — it was heavily cropped for the window).

In my featured image (of the four women) I make a reference to the past by including the man on the ladder. This was intentional because I’d just taken the earlier picture which included Clive Boursnell’s man on a ladder and I was thinking — as I always do in Covent Garden — of the area’s remarkable past. Today it’s the haunt of tourists and street entertainers, but much of its architecture remains intact. All I needed was something to connect the past to the present — and there it was! A ladder. With a man on it.

Getting Too Close
Alas, when I got closer to the ladder, I found modernity had really taken over. There was nothing jaunty about this man (except for his shoes — which I’d already included in the previous shot). Maybe I should have asked him to cock one leg out at an angle, but he didn’t seem in the mood. The lamp itself, which looks like it was once powered by gas, had already been adapted to take several electric bulbs. Time marches on and now the man on a ladder was replacing them with energy-saving “compact fluorescent lamps” (CFLs).

Perhaps my square photo is, after all, a bit “retro” because the sight of a ladder is becoming less common. The council normally provides motorised “cherry-pickers,” annoying appliances that shout warning sounds whenever they move (which is frequently). It’s possible there’s a class structure in the council workforce and this guy is not a skilled cherry-picking operative.

You can see the technical difficulties for yourself, both in my square picture and in Clive Boursnell’s original (square) shot. Looking up from ground level seems to have put both of us at a disadvantage. I prefer the cut-down, window-display version of Boursnell’s black and white image which concentrates on the foot in mid-air. Likewise, my featured photo (at the top, with just the feet) is far better than my later close-up.

I’m happy with two out of three. OK, I had to nick the ladder for “Red Hood, Turquoise Coat,” but even so…getting these three photos wasn’t bad for two minutes’ work.

Canals Are Streets Too

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As a street photographer I wish there were more canals and fewer streets. Canals are wonderful places for taking pictures but there are not enough of them. Those we have — in Amsterdam, Venice and Bangkok — are overrun by tourists, each one of whom seems to come equipped with an expensive camera.

Given that there is such a lot of competition from both tourists and serious travel photographers, I’m a little surprised that great “street photos” from the canals are not more widely seen. After all, the canal — in a very real sense — is just a street with water instead of tarmac.

In cities where canals criss-cross the urban landscape, people use them in much the same way as dry-landers use the city street. They travel from A to B via the canals; they transport goods on them; and very often they set up shop right there in the middle of the water.

There’s only one major difference. The pace of life on the canals is necessarily a whole lot slower. Five miles an hour is considered fast; twenty miles an hour, while possible, is definitely frowned upon.

Damnoen Saduak
I am fortunate in being able to visit one of the world’s most popular canal systems, near Bangkok, not as a tourist but as a relative by marriage.

My partner’s aunt has a house right on the main canal at Damnoen Saduak, the most famous of Thailand’s floating markets. There, it’s great fun to snuggle under the mosquito net at night, listening to the water lapping beneath the polished teak floor (although maybe less fun to be woken at 5.00am by the deafening racket of long-tail boats revving up their engines).

There are two ways to photograph the action at Damnoen Saduak: from the side of the canal or from a boat. You can get great shots either way, but those from a boat undoubtedly have the edge, especially if you want to get close-up portrait-style shots.

Portraits taken in natural light nearly always require the use of a reflector to balance the light and provide some illumination from below. But that’s only for dry-land photographers! Once you’re on a boat you can dispense with all the accessories because the water itself provides the reflection you need. I think even tourists are beginning to notice that their shots of each other on boats look better than those they take on dry land.

I’ve emphasised the similarity of canals to streets and I’ve suggested that street photography is something you can practice on a canal, but I have to add a word of caution. Don’t expect to do what’s commonly called “hardcore” street photography, either from a boat or from the canal’s edge. The atmosphere is much too relaxed for that. People are happy and smiling; their movements slow and predictable. Their way of life fits them like a glove, without all the hassle and friction normally sought by the hardcore street photographer.

The Garden Centre
For my featured image (at the top) I’ve chosen a lady in a boat who looks as relaxed as it’s possible to look while still actually working. She’s a one-woman garden centre, selling pot plants and refreshments at reasonable prices. I like the way her face is in shade whereas her wares are strongly illuminated by the sun. This seems appropriate, seeing that she’s tucked away quietly at the side, making no apparent effort to give anyone the “hard sell.” I think she needs all the commercial help I can provide.

In the sunlight, on the other side of the canal, another lady (above) is well-stocked with apples and young coconuts, ready to punt her way to a busier part of the market. She seems more extroverted and more likely to suggest a sale than her competition across the way. Both ladies, you can be sure, have been photographed hundreds of times — every week, during the tourist season.

I’ve recognised both of these subjects in other people’s photographs, but not as often as you might expect. They are usually in a group scene, along with all the other vendors.

If you go to Google Images and search for “Damnoen Saduak floating market” you’ll see what I mean. The photos brought back by the search are quite different from mine. With scarcely an exception, they’re all general shots of the crowded market, of dozens of boats laden with colourful goods. None of them really gets behind the gaudy spectacle of the market to the real world of individuals and their personal traits and characteristics.

Up Close
On the canals, the street photographer’s imperative to “get in close” can lead to pictures that are both more meaningful and more beautiful. On the occasion when I took these images I think I was helped by the presence of my elderly Thai father-in-law, riding up front in the boat, smiling at the ladies as we passed. His protection made me less of an alien intruder and more like “one of us.”

My favourite image from this short boat ride is of a younger woman who was selling assorted goods, including shopping bags and…yes…framed insects. She’s leaning on a thick bamboo pile which keeps her boat from moving out of position. I suspect she also has another, more conventional job elsewhere, but as I recall this was a Saturday, a day on which many people — one or two of our friends included — like to earn extra income trading on the canal.

Can you get this sort of image on the street? I don’t think so. Despite being so close to the camera, the woman shows no signs of being aware of it. She’s smiling at our whole party of people, not making direct contact with the camera. Although it’s a candid shot it has many of the qualities we expect in a proper portrait: good light, nice pose, interesting props. Nonetheless, I’m still going to claim it as a street photo. That’s why it’s here. Because canals are streets too.

The Pleasures of Red

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Red is a wonderful colour. For the Chinese it’s the colour of good luck and for others it’s the colour of passion. Too much of it is said to cause people to become agitated and lose their temper; too little leads to lethargy, caution and lack of vitality.

Street photographers in search of red usually have to rely on finding someone wearing a red dress or standing against a red background. It’s rare to find an entire collection of subjects and settings composed primarily of red or even vaguely reddish colours. In fact, at the risk of being overly cautious the street photographer may choose to avoid red altogether. It’s not the easiest colour to incorporate into a picture.

Personally, I love red — and orange and yellow — and I find them uplifting in comparison to the pervasive greys and browns of the typical city street. Any image composed primarily in red will be eye-catching. If you can offset this intense colour with some deep black, so much the better. You may have to wait for Chinese New Year before this combination comes along, but the wait will be worthwhile.

My featured image (above) was taken during Chinese New Year when workers were bringing extra lanterns for a street festival in Phuket Town. It was the Year of the Snake — or “little dragon” — so the twisting cables of the crane on the truck are significant. It’s best to represent the snake symbolically as it doesn’t like people seeing its body — or so the Chinese believe.

As you can see, the photo is not exclusively a composition in red. It contains orange (the side of the truck) and yellow (the worker’s tee-shirt and the lanterns’ tassles and inscriptions). There’s hardly any green or blue in the image. Do we miss them? Not really, although the picture may seem unusual because of its restricted palette.

Fortunately, anything unusual tends to go down well in street photography. Street scenes are all too familiar to most people, so you have to find ways of showing them in a new light. Hence, “unusual” equates to “good” in the street photographer’s lexicon.

When a Red Scene is Ready Made
The best source of red is undoubtedly red paint. It’s not always welcome, especially in the more conservative parts of London. There was, for example, the notorious case of the woman who painted her house in vertical, candy-coloured red and white stripes, taking revenge on her neighbours who’d prevented her from demolishing the house and adding an underground swimming pool to its replacement.

Red is often seen to be too “forward,” too provocative — as though it were being worn by a particularly aggressive Parisienne prostitute. That seemed to be the case in Kensington, where the adjoining houses now look unusually drab in the dull light of a typical London day. Nobody of class wants to look like a prostitute (or live next to one) but neither does anyone wish to seem dull and uninteresting. Neighbours! Don’t you just love them?

Red is not inappropriate on the facade of a public house (a London “pub”). Here it is (below) on The Coach and Horses in Soho. The paintwork is imaginative and bold, with white highlights and black window frames to alleviate the pervasive red — which seems to step forward towards us.

For the photo, all I needed was a man using a red phone (he was already in position when I walked past). This time there’s no yellow or orange, although the red itself has an orange tendency. The only jarring note is the blue bin on the right, but even that is counterbalanced by the vertical blue strip on the left.

Incidentally, this is the pub made famous by the patronage of the late Jeffrey Bernard — immortalised in the play “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell” in which Peter O’Toole returned to the London stage to take the part of the hard drinking journalist beset by various ailments.

The lone, male figure in my photo may trigger some people’s memories of the journalist, the play, the actor, and the legendary performances that followed.

When Red is Over the Top
The residents of London can breathe a sigh of relief that no artist has painted a mural as overwhelmingly red as the one (below) in Bangkok. This work, by the Japanese artist Motomichi Nakamura, is one of the most startling — and gigantic — murals I’ve ever seen.

Of course, the mural doesn’t lend itself to street photography, because what else can you do except reproduce it? Any live action in the street will always be completely smothered by the tormented expressions of the red creatures on the wall. Here I’ve done my best, cutting off most of the mural while capturing a glimpse of the street alongside it.

In a curious way, the photograph works because the hugh graffiti-like mural — for all its jumble of alien forms — is actually better organised than anything on the street. The real world seems to be a mess compared to the jolly gathering of ghostly life-forms with their impassive stares and rictus grins.

Motomichi is a philosopher and scientist when he speaks of the colour red. As he says on his website: “(It) increases the pulse and heart rate, and raises your blood pressure. Red also has the smallest refractive index and visually it appears closer than reality.” By using it together with black and white, he makes his creatures — what he calls his “cryptozoological monsters” — look larger than life.

The Tendencies of Red
As pure colour, without being darkened by black or lightened by white, red can tend either towards yellow or blue. Red with a yellow tendency can be called “tomato red” (Coach and Horses) while red with a blue tendency is a kind of “berry red” (Motomichi).

It good to be aware that red has as much variety as any other colour, not only in appearance but also in meaning. Stock market prices are dropping if they’re shown in red in New York or London — but red figures in East Asia denote a rise in value.

Whether it means plus or minus, “passion” or “danger,” red in the street photo is impossible to miss. I never leave home without it.

Finding Great Compositions in Unpromising Subjects

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If you were to ask me what I like most about street photography I’d have say it’s this: looking at an unpromising scene then somehow finding a composition that pleases me.

The sensation gives me a real buzz. It’s like winning a bet on the horses. You’re hoping your horse will come in, but you don’t really expect it. When your horse actually wins you feel you’ve cheated the odds, because the odds are nearly always against you.

For the street photographer, an unexpected winnings in an unpromising situation is “something for nothing.” It’s catching a bird with your empty hand. It’s manna from heaven.

On a Quiet Day
Recently I was taking shots in London’s Camden Market on a morning when most of the day’s visitors had still not arrived. It was early in the tourist season. Only a few people were walking around the food stalls which were just beginning to get ready for lunch.

I didn’t expect to find a single composition in the lunch area and was thinking of moving elsewhere. At that point, several things came together at once. Three chefs in a shabby kitchen started rummaging around in an interesting manner. A girl wearing a lovely stripey jumper walked into the scene, then a man paused in front of me holding a blue coat (see the featured image at the top).

With luck or judgement (I don’t know which) I managed to get each of the foreground figures so their profiles appear clearly against the background. Given the jumble and complexity of the background this was a definite bonus. If the man had moved a few inches forward the shot would have been ruined.

Getting Technical
Fortunately I was fully prepared for this kind of shot, although I didn’t expect to get it. With the camera in Aperture Priority mode I’d stopped down my 40mm lens from f/2.8 to f/5.6, giving 1/1000th sec. in the bright sunlight. I usually “expose to the right” (i.e., ensure that the shadows get enough exposure) but the mixture of white shirts and black stalls made me avoid setting any exposure bias.

Now, you may or may not think this is a good shot. It depends on how you look at it. All I can say is: it’s the sort of shot I really like — whether taken by me or someone else. There are plenty of diagonals in it to give a sense of dynamic movement. By contrast there are static items piled up in makeshift fashion behind the stall.

However, it’s not just the many diagonal lines that lead the eye to the centre of the photo, there’s also the gaze of the two visitors. These two potential customers don’t seem to know what to make of it all. The stall may be a bit too exotic for them — like the hot-air balloon tattoo on the back of the chef’s leg. You, the viewer of the photo, are invited to see the stall through the eyes of these two people with their respective — and clearly different — reactions of amusement and cool evaluation.

Forcing the Composition to Work
Later in the day I’d moved back to Covent Garden which was intensely crowded on a Friday afternoon. After taking shots of multiple people I began to look for isolated figures, just for a change of tempo.

Two men sprawled in awkward positions on the pavement beneath a colonnade do not make a promising subject, especially when their heads are bent down over their mobile phones. My first thought was to walk past and find a different subject. I prefer the challenge of photographing people who are moving around rather than lying down in “sitting duck” mode.

Then it occurred to me: why not give equal emphasis to the column and the cobbled street? By the simple expedient of squatting down, unnoticed, in front of the two men, I took the shot you see below.

I don’t really like to force a composition to work, but in this case I think it’s successful. The two working men are resting during their lunch break. Their extremely casual positions are in sharp contrast to the formality of their surroundings. Gravity seems to be pulling them towards the ground, almost matching pound-for-pound the weight of the stones and the column. Behind them are feminine fripperies in the shop windows (including the season’s “must have” handbags) so different from the building and the sort of men who built it.

The Streets Are Surreal

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The Surrealist movement in art predates street photography by only a few years. Yet back in the 1920s when it first got going, there would have been little chance of finding suitable subjects on the street. How the world has changed!

Walking down a city street in the early twenty-first century you could easily come across three giant fried eggs on which it’s possible to jump up and down. Or you can crouch in a large crumpled coffee cup, or admire a disembodied bronze hand taller than yourself.

Quite apart from all the deliberately surrealist modern sculptures, the cities’ inhabitants contribute surrealism of their own with multi-coloured hairstyles, lurid tattoos, piercings, and elaborate accessories.

In European cities we retain many of the old, classical buildings, against which the weirdly-presented passers-by seem even more surreal. A man with a high-viz jacket and a blue Mohican haircut, leaning against a white Doric column, is a ready-made street photo.

In fact, there are so many oddly dressed and outrageously coiffured people walking past the Georgian architecture of London that I don’t photograph them unless there’s a compelling reason for doing so. All I can offer for my featured image (above) is a scene from Bangkok: of a giant bottle of Kikkoman sauce with a scantily-clad girl standing in front of it.

The Mind of Freud
Surrealism sprang from the imagination of artists, inspired by the psychological explorations of Sigmund Freud into the subconscious mind. There was a tinge of Romanticism in the way it challenged rationality, introducing illogical elements into the picture, made all the more impossible by being depicted with the utmost realism.

From the outset, photography was a useful tool because it reproduced objects with great exactitude — much faster than Salvador Dali could paint a melting clock face. However, anyone wishing to make surreal photographs was obliged to create the scene, using ingenious sets with strange perspectives and incongruous figures.

Man Ray, the American-born artist who often used photography as his primary tool, became a master of the unexpected juxtaposition which delighted the eye while (slightly) disturbing the mind.

The Pioneer
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the pioneer of street photography, was strongly influenced by Surrealism — even though his work never became as overtly surrealist as Man Ray’s. In Paris he mixed with the Surrealists who gathered at the Café Cyrano in the Place Blanche and absorbed their ideas. In particular he was struck by the emphasis they placed on spontaneity and the subconscious.

On the streets in the 1930s and 1940s, Cartier-Bresson didn’t find the bizarre mixture of surrealist people, objects and artworks we have today, but he succeeded in taking images which have a surrealist edge. He found ambiguities, juxtapositions and gestures that communicate meaning where you least expect it.

Because of Cartier-Bresson’s continued influence, street photography has always been at least slightly surrealistic. It’s what sets it apart from photojournalism. A street photograph tries to capture the attention of onlookers by drawing the eye towards something remarkable, then rewarding it with other qualities such as great composition, vivid detail, or even emotional content.

Just Desserts
I’m quite shameless in using advertising hoardings, street sculptures and promotional events to bring surrealism to my images. Here, for example, is an outlet for mango desserts in Bangkok, topped with an Austrian-style feathered hat. (That’s on the outlet, not on the dessert).

If I could have shown this image to the artists and photographers in the Café Cyrano in the 1920s I think they’d have been very impressed. Would Cartier-Bresson have guessed that the two girls were taking a “selfie”? With a phone-on-a-stick? Probably not.

Gigantism Always Works
When you photograph the human figure, expand it to enormous size and place it on a poster — or create a three-dimensional model from it — you’ve surely entered the world of surrealism. Such works have the effect of dwarfing those on the street, while possibly inflating people’s sense of importance as they identify with the man or woman in the poster.

Highly realistic images of martial arts champions occupy a vast hoarding outside a gym in Hong Kong, their belt buckles alone being the height of a man. Walking past, I found a cluster of people huddled beneath them, probably placing bets. If I showed you the whole of the poster you wouldn’t see the people very clearly, so I cropped the image to leave just the “thumbs up” and the fighter’s medals. The long-fingered hand, on the left, seems particularly surreal — until you realise it’s pushing against a pane of glass, causing the fingers to splay.

Slightly Incomprehensible
Personally I prefer surrealism to be more subtle, dropping little hints of incomprehensibility here and there.

Pottinger Street in Hong Kong is one of the best-known photogenic hot-spots (Kai Wong, formerly of Digital Rev, goes there from time to time). The hairdresser’s notice board changes frequently. When I was there it said “Stay, Gold, Pony, Boy” which presumably means something to somebody. And, oh yes, the railings are covered in knitting.

That’s really how I like my surrealism. You can keep your burning giraffes and “honey sweeter than blood.” For me it’s “Stay, Gold, Pony, Boy” and knit me a jumper for the Bank of China. It can get quite chilly in Hong Kong.

Is Street Photography Riddled with Clichés?

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Street photography is an acquired taste. It’s often criticised for showing people in unflattering situations and invading their privacy. Some critics claim it to be contrived or even faked. Yet by far the most damaging criticism — and one which is hard to deflect — says street photography is (to use a hackneyed phrase) riddled with clichés.

The definition of the word cliché normally refers to stereotyped expressions, such as an over-used phrase or a popular homily. We now apply it to other forms of expression beyond spoken language: to art, design, fashion and, of course, photography. Anything that’s trite or commonplace through constant repetition can be considered a cliché.

Sadly, clichés are a bit like faded movie stars who’ve lost the unique look for which they became famous. Every cliché starts out as a strikingly original thought — embodied in art or language — only to become trite with overuse. The phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” is a prime and self-referential example.

Street photography, taken “en masse,” certainly betrays a high level of cliché, a fact which is surprising when you consider how life in the street is constantly changing. I’m not a mathematician, but I reckon there are more potential combinations of figures, objects and environment in street photography than there are molecules on Earth.

Where the Problem Lies
The problem lies chiefly in two places: in reality’s superficial similarities — where one man in a grey suit looks much like any other — and in how we interpret what we see, selecting subjects which other photographers have previously chosen with demonstrable success.

Let’s take the similarities first. Street furniture in every big city normally conforms to a pattern: the bus shelters are similar to each other, the street lamps identical, the storm drains indistinguishable.

Take my featured image (above), for example. The brightly coloured plastic chairs say “Thailand,” the storm drain says “Bangkok.” I think you can also see the remains of a telephone kiosk on the right, now derelict thanks to the mobile phone.

However, in my treatment of the subject I’ve used these clichés to original effect, ironically by drawing attention to them. By chopping off the heads of the diners I’m left with a stereotypical meal, enjoyed on the sidewalk like a million other meals that day, with bowls, plates and beakers in clichéd pastel pink and green. I’m hoping the clichés have devoured each other. Am I right?

Now let’s turn to how we interpret what we see in front of us. In looking for shots we’re undoubtedly influenced by the work of other photographers. It’s hard to gaze into a shop window without thinking of Vivian Maier’s self portraits, or to see a vagrant without recalling Berenice Abbott’s “Bowery Bum.” There’s a temptation to take a similar shot, as if to say: “Look, I can do it, too!”

Puddle-Stepping Man
Is it wrong to imitate in this way? No one’s going to stop you, but only if you come up with something truly original and effective will people take notice. They’ll praise you, make you famous, and very soon they’ll start to copy you. In fact, they’ll turn your present-day originality into tomorrow’s cliché. Seriously, doesn’t Henri Cartier-Bresson’s puddle-stepping man in “Behind the Gare St. Lazare” (so original in 1932) look a little bit trite after so many imitations?

There’s a touch of Cartier-Bresson in my photo (below) of a mother and son taking a photo outside the former site of the Photographer’s Gallery in London. The clichés are obvious: the fancy decoration on the lamp-post, the ubiquitous phone kiosk (affectionately retained by popular demand), the counterbalancing red of the frequently seen CCTV notice.

But what delights me is the boy’s momentary lapse of concentration as his mother attempts to show him how to take a photo. He’s probably tired from skateboarding and fascinated by the bottle of water he’s carrying. The way in which his hand is frozen in mid-movement competes for “the decisive moment” with his mother’s adjustment of the camera (alarmingly pointed in my direction).

My shot does not imitate any photo ever taken by Cartier-Bresson, but his influence is there and I’m happy to acknowledge it. Despite the presence of ubiquitous objects — and despite the influence of HCB — I think I’ve avoided cliché.

In Quirky Mode
Does my final photo (below) do the same? I’m not so sure. Once you embrace the quirky mode of street photography there’s a greater danger of falling into cliché.

Visual humour has an obviousness that can be unsatisfying. We look at the image, we “get it” immediately, and move on. There’s no reason to linger if the point of a photo is (say) the apparent substitution of a football for a man’s head because the subject is standing in a certain position. These visual quirks have been done to death. I’m no longer amused.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t resist taking a shot of the Jimmy Choo shop in Hong Kong, prior to its opening. I wonder, did the shop designer plan this amusing scenario deliberately, with candid photography in mind? Or was it the PR company, looking for snaps that go viral?

I’ve no idea. But I have huge admiration for the original image, shot by Los Angeles-based photographer Cass Bird, with the Danish model Nadja Bender. Their whole photo shoot for the project was outstanding — and based on the idea of juxtaposing vintage and modern designs.

My juxtaposition — with the storeman at the receiving end of the fashion world’s chain of command — is somewhat more quirky. I think it works. You tell me.

Finding a Face in the Crowd

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The street photographer can take distant shots of people in the rush hour and the result is nearly always the same: cut-out, cardboard figures in an urban landscape.

It’s so easy to see a crowd of people as being composed of anonymous, faceless individuals — scarcely individuals at all, just components of a seething mass of humanity.

Then suddenly you spot someone who doesn’t quite go with the flow. Maybe this person is trying to move in the opposite direction. Maybe her expression is out of tune with the rest. Perhaps she is laughing, or crying, or merely turning her face towards you — and you notice how beautiful she is, how she contrasts with the sullenness of the rush hour commuters.

The person who stands out in the crowd can be a man or a woman, but seldom a child. For the “face in the crowd” shot you need the subject to be reasonably tall.

Yet while height is one factor, it’s not the only one. The subject’s face, seen in the context of an otherwise anonymous crowd, must have “something about it,” something memorable and therefore worth committing to the long-term memory of photography.

Realisation
Finding a face in a crowd is not a theme I’ve developed to any great extent — on the whole I tend to avoid preconceptions — so I don’t have a stack of photos to illustrate the concept adequately. However, my featured image (above) shows you the gist of what I mean.

Taken in a busy market place, the picture is a detail from a crowd photo. I’ve cropped it because otherwise the lady in the white hat is too far over to the left — and the purple parasol becomes the main subject. Cropped further, centralising the “face in the crowd,” results in too great a loss in resolution. (I took the shot with my old Fuji S5Pro).

For all its faults, I’m reluctant to reject the image because it captures something that moves me, a quality that would be lost in a posed portrait.

I think it’s because of the crowd.

The subject seems to be so very much at home among a crowd of people, even when they pass her in the opposite direction. She is thinking seriously about something, but she is not “lost in thought.” She glances to one side — and it’s this glance which, for me, makes the picture.

In the next photo (below) we can see the faces of other people besides that of the main subject. The man looks towards us, but doesn’t quite make eye contact. Again, people are passing him — this time in both directions — but he stands steadfast without any outward sign of frustration. He seems to have caught the eye of the blonde woman on the right, but others jostle their way past him, looking for goods in the winter market.

I’ve called this photo “Face in the Crowd,” although not without a touch of irony. Most of the colours tone together reasonably well, except for one. The vivid pink of the Muppet-like toy at the back jumps out at us, drawing our eyes to its one eye.

Unlike the lady in the first photo, the man in the grey overcoat is not glancing, as such. He seems to be more like a character from a movie: Jason Bourne perhaps, pausing impassively while calculating the odds of survival.

The Cinematic Style
When the subject is a “face in the crowd” the photo immediately makes you think of the movies. That’s because you’re using a cinematic technique: the long shot before moving in for a close-up.

In films, the star is instantly recognisable, so it’s easy to pick out him or her from the rest of the crowd, especially when helped by framing, tracking or zooming. In street photography, where a single still image is usually the entire work, when you borrow the cinematic style it allows you similar freedom of composition.

Foreground figures can be out of focus; people at the edge of the frame can be chopped in half. The onlooker will see the still image as being filmic: with the extras moving in and out of frame while the camera dwells on the starring actor.

This is true of the image below, which I took at around the same time as the featured image at the top of the post. The girl with the pink parasol looks round and sees my camera. She doesn’t have time to react self-consciously, unlike the woman on the left, who may have seen the camera and is deliberately looking to one side while primping her hair. The whole composition could be a frame from a movie.

On the Waterloo Steps
Where better to find a face in the crowd than on the steps of London’s Waterloo Station during rush hour? I often find myself here, having crossed the river to chase better light at the end of the day.

I wonder how many people who pass through Waterloo Station’s main entrance appreciate that it’s a memorial to the dead of the First World War? The steps are spanned by Victory Arch and flanked either side by gigantic lamps supported by obelisks.

In this place I’m always reminded of “The Face on the Waterloo Steps” at the beginning of John Cowper Powys’s novel “Wolf Solent.” Powys’s anti-hero — on his way to the West Country of his childhood to take up a new job — sees a vagrant wearing a look of “inert despair.” The man’s face haunts Wolf for the rest of the narrative. It’s an echo of the war. Thus begins a search for identity and meaning in one of the twentieth century’s great literary works.

Alas, I’m already haunted by other images, so I have no wish to photograph my own version of inert despair. I prefer this image (below) of a man with a bicycle, struggling with determination against the flow of the crowd.

Unlike Powys’s anti-hero he seems to exude heroism, with his camo jacket, tight grip, and deliberate movements. He is surrounded by much younger people who, like Wolf himself, are still undefined by their limited life-experience, but this man with his own transport clearly knows who he is — and where he’s going. He’s more than a face in the crowd. He’s a complete figure.

Can You Hear a Street Photo?

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The short answer is no. Of course you can’t hear a street photo. It’s entirely silent, unless you give it an audio soundtrack.

You see: I could never be a politician. I’d answer the interviewers’ questions directly and truthfully. “Are you going to raise taxes?” “Yes, if we feel like it.”

Silence is one the greatest qualities of the still photo. Every point the picture makes — every joy or sadness it brings to the viewer — has to be achieved soundlessly. Even if you show an image of a screeching cormorant, or a brass band, or a nuclear explosion, the sound is notable only by its absence.

Schubert’s Babbling Brook
Last night I was watching (on YouTube) the pianist András Schiff give a master class on playing Franz Schubert’s Impromptu in G flat major. He pointed out that the left hand needed to sustain the tempo of the “babbling brook” which never pauses as the young pianist was obliging it to do. “The brook has to stay in its flow,” said Schiff.

Schubert often evokes images of the country. Wind, birdsong, the sounds of small animals scampering through the undergrowth — he makes us think of all these things and we can imagine many of them visually when they occur.

It appears that the auditory sense can trigger a visual response, albeit an imaginative one, but not vice versa. We see Schubert’s scampering animals in our “mind’s eye” when we listen to the music, but we don’t hear the rumble of thunder when we look at a landscape photo taken in a storm. I think there’s a simple explanation for this phenomenon.

Music is better able to represent particular subjects in sound because it can be very specific in its imitation. Just listen to Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from his opera “Peter Grimes.” You almost have to blink when he evokes dazzling sunlight striking the water at dawn — and the storm sequence nearly induces a feeling of seasickness later in the piece.

The Silence of Images
By contrast, a photo is very unspecific. The first photograph I ever took was of the Coldstream Guards’ marching band. If I looked at it today I could not recall what the musicians sounded like, or tell you what they were playing. I’ve lost the print I made at the time, but I can still remember that one of the drummers seemed to be wearing a dead leopard. To me, the image was notable for the absence of a snarl — but I couldn’t hear that either.

I’ve tried playing with the idea of representing sound, but nothing worked until I took the featured image (above). In the background you can see a women’s choir called “Funky Voices” performing at a local street festival. In the foreground a woman with red hair is holding the musical director’s dog, which appears to be listening intently — and silently — to the sound.

When the music is good we listen in silence. That’s the point of the picture. The photo, unable to evoke sound, has to show a person and a dog in silent listening mode. It works because the dog probably doesn’t understand the music but appears to be hypnotised by it. If there’s one false note you feel he might start howling.

Incidentally, I know the dog belongs to the musical director because I contacted Funky Voices to get permission to use the photo in a competition called Essence of Essex. I didn’t win. The prize went to a photo of a plastic hamburger. Somehow, I think the judges didn’t really “get” what I was trying to do. I don’t normally subscribe to the “labour theory of value” (something is more valuable if it’s more laborious to make), but, frankly, plastic hamburgers are way too easy in comparison to silent music.

Deeper Into Silence
Any exploration of the role of sound in street photography simply leads us deeper into silence.

My photo of a woman snoozing next to a sculpture of a banjo player is slightly surreal. Has she been lulled to sleep by the man’s playing? Or is she listening to the non-existent music in silence? No, she just appears to be in the presence of sound, which helps to bring the sculpture to life. The musician seems to glow with energy (when in fact he’s suffering the halo effect from boosted shadows).

The banjo player (I’m calling his instrument a banjo but it might be a zhongruan or some other oriental variation) is entirely silent because there are no strings to his instrument. His pose is sedate and undramatic, a far cry from the gyrations of popular music.

Jazz and rock ‘n roll musicians are more photogenic than classical artists partly because they move more violently when they play — and the camera freezes the movement. Likewise the camera also eliminates sound. We don’t miss its absence because we’re compensated by being able to scrutinise the frozen movement.

Yet if you think about it, there’s always something poignant about the absence of sound, especially when someone in the image is playing an instrument. Can you hear the guitarist, practising in the street in my photo below? No, and the cartoon characters on his shoulder strap can sing as loud as they like, but you’ll never hear them either.