John Lewell

No Laughing Matter

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For every street photo of a person laughing I can find a dozen more in which the subjects are straight-faced or downright miserable. I reckon that’s about the right proportion. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Just imagine the absurdity of a world in which everyone walked around laughing their heads off all the time. It just wouldn’t feel right.

There’s too much misery in the modern world — and too much news about it — for laughter to occur with greater frequency in public. Yet when it appears spontaneously between friends who are sharing a private joke (as in my image below) it can bring joy to everyone who sees it.

Genuine laughter signifies a moment of happiness when, despite all the odds, joy bubbles up to the surface. It’s a rare and wonderful phenomenon to see on the street — and well worth recording. As Woody Allen said: “I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.”

Please note that I’ve qualified “laughter” with the adjective “genuine” — and I do so because there’s plenty of malicious laughter, cynical laughter, false laughter to be seen, both in public and private. Mocking laughter is ghastly to behold, especially when it’s captured permanently in a street photo.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky made much the same point when he wrote (in “The Adolescent”): “If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analysing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.”

The Twin Founts of Laughter
Some people are more predisposed to laugh than others, but they can be fundamentally happy or sad. Laughter is a response to both conditions. “You have to see the funny side,” people will often say when misfortune strikes. Many of our greatest comedians have suffered from depression and quite a few have committed suicide. Laughter didn’t save them.

The philospher Friedrich Nietzsche noted: “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

The science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut put it more amusingly: “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterwards.”

I don’t think it’s the job of the street photographer to make people laugh. We’re not comedians. If we show people laughing in our photos it’s because the phenomenon makes a good photo. It tells us something about the person — and about human beings in general — that you’d never see in a posed portrait.

Laughter in the Doorway
Because laughter can be either joyful or cynical, I like to photograph it whenever I have the opportunity. The other day I was walking along a street in London when I noticed two men standing in a doorway. One of them started laughing and I took a quick shot before he noticed me.

Maybe the shutter on my DSLR is too loud, but for whatever reason the laughing man saw me, scowled, and said: “I really don’t want you to take my photo.” Frankly, I was surprised. He seemed in such a happy mood!

I apologised, then checked the image (which wasn’t that great) and deleted it in front of him. I explained that I was taking pictures of people laughing, to which his friend chipped in with: “This guy laughs at everything.” We all ended up having a good laugh about it.

It’s my guess that the laughing man in the doorway wouldn’t have passed Dostoyevsky’s test of goodness. I think he was afraid the photo would be too revealing — would tell us something about him which he’d prefer to keep hidden under the cloak of noisy laughter.

Seen But Not Heard
You see: it’s the noise of laughter that covers up any insincerity a person may be hiding. Once you remove the noise — as the photo is bound to do — all that remains is gesture and expression. From these we can detect whether the laughter is genuine or fake with much greater ease, especially in the quietness of the viewing moment.

I like that phrase “The Quietness of the Viewing Moment” but I’m tempted to erase it from this post before someone steals it for the title of a book on photography. Perhaps I should copyright it here and now with today’s date: 23 March 2017.

Yesterday
Considering its subject, I’d intended to write this article in a better mood. But after yesterday’s latest ISIS-related atrocity (the attack on the UK Parliament) I feel sombre, like most of my fellow citizens.

My final quote is from the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said (as recorded by Alan Wood in “Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic,” 1957): “The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”

Genuine laughter returns once happiness returns, but not before.

Find One Subject, Wait for Another

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All experienced street photographers know about the technique of finding a good, well-lit background, then waiting for a passer-by to walk in front of it. The result can be a great, original shot — or a terrible cliché, depending on the background and the passing subject.

You can take this technique further by finding a subject — one that may well, on its own, satisfy the average travel photographer — and try to complete the picture by waiting for another subject to move into frame.

I say “complete the picture” because, so often, a subject on its own does not constitute an effective street photo. Take my featured image (above), for example. I came across this woman selling rabbits in Bangkok. She’s a one-girl pet shop, sitting on the pavement with a stock of baby rabbits in small cages. I looked at her and wondered whether or not to take a photo.

You Need More than Rabbits
To be frank, I was reluctant to bother with it. I’d taken shots previously — I guess everyone has — of street sellers, street performers, street artists — and not one of them satisfies me as a genuine street photo. I remembered a Chinese man selling orangeade who smiled sweetly at the camera, another guy making insect sculptures out of straw, a woman making garlands. When I was a travel photographer looking for “local colour” they all seemed to be great subjects, but no longer. Now I need more than rabbits to make my day.

I had to admit, the old lady made a colourful image, so I thought I’d wait for a pretty girl to walk past. Freezing the action would also add some life to an otherwise static image. In the event I was fortunate to have the photo completed by a girl whose youth and femininity make her seem as vulnerable as the patient rabbits in their cages, if a whole lot freer.

For this technique to work effectively you need to find a subject that’s reasonably static and likely to be joined by another, possibly unrelated subject, in the immediate future. In the example of the rabbits I knew there was a busy clothes market just a few yards behind me, so there was a good chance of a pretty girl walking past. I needed to linger only a minute or so before getting the shot.

Early Beginnings
I started using the “find one subject, wait for another” technique a few years ago, building on “find a background, wait for a passer-by” which I learned from photographer and fellow student Paddy Summerfield at art school but had never put into practice until taking up digital photography. Here’s the image for which I first used it.

There’s busy road outside Bangkok’s Pantip Plaza, a shopping mall dedicated to selling computers where you could buy a hacked copy of Photoshop for less than ten dollars (no, Adobe, I didn’t!). On emerging from this place I blinked in the sun and noticed the curiously carved hedge, one of the better examples of topiary adorning the main thoroughfares. A motorcycle drew up alongside it. I almost had everything I needed for a picture, except for the blank space on the left.

On this occasion I waited for two or three minutes. Traffic lights can be slow to change in Bangkok, which I find very frustrating if I’m in a car, but this time it worked to my advantage. Eventually, two young woman walked past and I managed to freeze the action at the right moment.

I’ve always had some affection for this image, not just because it was my first experiment with a new technique, but because of the curiously human appearance of the hedge. Thailand’s state symbol is the “Garuda” (or “Krut” in Thai) a mythical half-man/half-bird from Hindu mythology, supposedly the winged mount of Vishnu. In Thailand you can see depictions of the Garuda everywhere, but few as startlingly humanoid as this one. I think the gardeners were trying to encourage the growth of a beak, but without much luck.

Worst Case Scenario
What happens when no one comes along to complete the picture? That’s a good question, if a little pessimistic. Nearly always, someone does indeed move into the frame, into the precise place where you hoped they’d go. The trouble is: nine times out of ten it’s the wrong person.

In street photography you need to be able to deploy an entire armoury of weapons at the same time. If one technique doesn’t work, perhaps another one will.

Take heart from the legend of the Garuda who, while on a quest to free his mother from servitude, received the gift of immortality from Vishnu. The Garuda’s magical descendants are able to change their form, build cities, and even have romances with human women if they so desire.

Magic is only ever half a step away and you can sometimes feel its presence on the street.

Why I Never Shoot Black and White

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Sometimes, on those occasions when I’m viewing a terrific portfolio of black and white street photography by one of its many practitioners, I suddenly get the feeling that — yes! — B&W is the Only True Way.

When this happens, my aesthetic attitude towards photography suddenly flips so that black and white becomes “real photography” whereas anything with colour seems garish, tasteless, and maybe a bit too ordinary — like the real world.

What follows is an urge to rush out to buy a Leica Monochrome M or even one of those old-fashioned cameras you had to load with long strips of photosensitive material (you know the ones I mean). Film cameras! With Tri-X film.

“Eeee lad, you can’t beat a gritty, grainy photo taken with Tri-X, now can you?”

The voice in my head extolling the virtues of Tri-X has somehow taken on a working class Yorkshire accent, making me pause to reconsider my options. I start to wonder what on earth has possessed me to entertain even a passing thought that black and white film might, in 2017, be preferable to digital colour.

The fact is: I never shoot black and white. The pictures you see in this blog post were never intended to be black and white, they just ended up that way because they didn’t work in colour. In other words, my black and white photos are really failed colour photos. Making them monochrome (like those below) has rescued them from oblivion.

Why Do People Do It?
We see the world in colour and we have sophisticated tools that allow us to portray the world in colour with great accuracy — so why do so many street photographers still shoot in black and white?

For example, I was looking at the work of photographers in the BULB collective: BULB stands for (Bucharest Urban League of photographers for the Balkans). Their standard is impressive and I can honestly say I enjoyed looking at every image, even though 95% of their photos are in black and white. Only Niki Gleoudi presents a portfolio entirely in colour — and it’s her work to which I can relate most closely.

So why do Niki Gleoudi’s fellow members concentrate almost exclusively on black and white photography, rather than become inspired by her excellent colour compositions?

I think there are several reasons, the strongest of which is tradition. The long tradition of black and white photography has created an aesthetic (a way of looking at pictures) all of its own. It’s the habit of thought into which I flip when I view lots of very good black and white photos, like those of the BULB collective. I almost get the same religion — because it’s certainly very contagious — but then I wake up and return to colourful Earth.

Travelling South
Years ago, as a student, I travelled in Italy to study art and take photographs of the scenery and architecture (on black and white film). When I got back I developed and printed my shots of Florence, Venice and Rome, then framed and hung them alongside some prints I’d bought of paintings by Giorgione and Bellini. It occurred to me, even then, that the medium of photography was deliberately setting itself apart from painting by remaining black and white. How otherwise could it compete with the glory of Venetian colour?

“Back in the day” — in, say, the early sixteenth century — the Florentines were more than a little envious of the Venetian ability to use colour. The artists of Florence may have been masters of form but in their mastery of colour the Venetians — Giorgione, Bellini, Sebastiano del Piombo and colleagues — were incomparable. Only occasionally did the two camps merge, as when Sebastiano based his murals in the Borgherini Chapel on drawings by Michelangelo, adding colours that were deeper and more subtle than those you see on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

All the painters, from whatever school, used colour — but maybe the sea-going Venetians had better access to valuable colour pigments from the Orient. Or maybe the light was better in watery Venice than elsewhere in Italy. Whatever it was, the fact that so many Venetian artists were skilled colourists cannot have been accidental. Like the ongoing fetish for black and white photography it was a cultural phenomenon, with causes and effects.

One of the effects of seeing Venetian prints on my wall was to make me even more aware of the role that colour plays in composition. When you leave it out — or downplay it, as many painters do — composition becomes much easier. But you would have to be completely colour-blind to resist the seductive appeal of those rich fabrics, rendered so perfectly by the Venetians. Their colours create beautiful textures — and it is texture, along with colour, which is often lacking in black and white photography.

Typically, a black and white street photograph has deep blacks (that’s a must!), lots of murky shadow, plenty of white areas with little or no detail, and a cluster of shades that normally correspond to skin tones. All the subtlety gets crammed into these skin tones, drawing attention to faces, arms, legs and bare skin.

Once you drain the world of colour you remove some of its vitality. Nudes look more “arty” and less titillating in black and white. Surfaces — especially skin — appear less touchable, more remote, more suited to the ivory tower of the art gallery: that special place which is a mental concept as much as a physical one.

The Reinstatement of Colour
The first colour photographer to make a serious impact on the art world was William Eggleston who shot in black and white until around 1965. His photos of mundane objects and ordinary people in suburban Memphis, Tennessee and nearby states like Mississippi and Georgia had the power to change the prevailing aesthetic, albeit slowly. For example, “Creative Camera” magazine, founded in 1968, did not embrace colour until December 1984.

However, it’s not the art photographer who’s been the biggest counter-influence against the black and white aesthetic. It’s the travel photographer.

It’s impossible to look at the work of great travel photographers and say: “I wish they’d stuck to black and white.” What would Steve McCurry’s pictures look like if drained of colour? Indeed, what would images brought back from the far-flung corners of Africa, India, Pakistan, South America and Asia look like if they were all monochrome? Could we really bear to lose the vivid colouring of the clothes, headgear, ornaments and furnishings in which these images abound.

I could name dozens of travel photographers who demonstrate my point admirably. For example, recently I was looking at the work of Kevin Perry who travels to distant corners of the world, far from his native city Seattle, and brings back the message that the world is full of colour. I can’t imagine that anyone would wish him to photograph in black and white.

Years ago, when artists travelled south they were invariably astonished to discover a world of colour in the clear light of Africa (Paul Klee, August Macke) or the South Pacific (Paul Gauguin). It appears that our travel photographers do the same today.

So is black and white photography the product of our cloud-covered northern cities? Certainly the tradition has remained with us, despite pronouncements about the “death of black and white” made thirty years ago.

Personally, I’d hate to see it disappear altogether, but I’d also like see more street photographers making a bigger effort to get to grips with colour.

In my view, black and white street photographers are hiding in an ivory tower, setting themselves apart not only from the great painters of the past and present but also from the world of commerce and advertising. Surely it’s time to rejoin the real world?

 

Busy Foreground, Plain Background

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I’m always keeping half an eye open for subjects framed against a plain background, although I don’t make it a firm stipulation. Usually, I let my creative impulse play with jumbled backgrounds, but sometimes a critical voice in my head says: “Go on, take those guys against the darkened doorway. They’ll look great.”

All photography experts say: “Simplify! simplify!” and the sensible person follows their advice. Ninety percent of “good photography” is uncluttered — the image paired down to essentials so that the main subject makes an uninterrupted statement. However, not wanting to follow all the rules I try to enlarge the scope of what seems possible in photographic composition. I like to include bits of chaos here and there.

The background in my featured image (above) is not, of course, entirely plain. It’s the back of a bus. It has rivets, tail lights and lettering; it even has two different colours. Yet compared to the normal cluttered background of the street it’s very plain indeed. I liked the fact that its prevailing colour is Girly Pink, whereas the two people on the scooter — trying to weave their way through the traffic — are tough-looking men who’ve clearly done a good day’s work.

I call the image “Hemmed In,” which sums up the situation of these two men, caught up in the Bangkok rush hour. It’s precisely the kind of image I like to get. Significant visual content fills the frame. There are details in all the corners — glimpses beyond the rectangle — a sense that life is going on all around, not just in front of the camera.

Finding plain backgrounds in a city like Bangkok is not easy. The Thai people love to decorate everything with elaborate carvings, quirky sculptures, intricate garlands, keepsakes and mementoes. Add to these the lush, dishevelled growth of tropical plants and the chaos of overhead cables and you get a background that’s not at all conducive to traditional, paired-down, western photography.

Blurring the Background
With close-up photography you can rely on “bokeh” to give the subject the prominence it needs, while still retaining a sense of context in the image. Personally, I don’t find this technique as rewarding as keeping the background in sharp focus — as in my featured image. We see portraits against out-of-focus backgrounds so often.

In the image below I’ve attempted a compromise between the two approaches. The tuk-tuk driver is in sharp focus, but so is the red light at the top right of the frame. The rest has varying degrees of blur and you can just make out a figure in blue, walking behind a tree.

I was lucky to get the shot, because drivers don’t often engage in such earnest conversation. This one was explaining to my partner how he would take us, free of charge, to our destination if only we would allow him to introduce us to a couple of jewelers and a tailor along the way. We agreed — and managed to survive the next half-hour without buying any jewels or suits. I even got a couple of other good shots during the trip.

Really Busy Foreground
I’m not entirely sure whether the subject of my next photo (below) is the decoration on the window bars or the drowsy man on the other side of them. Necessarily it’s a combination of the two, as both are in sharp focus. The background is a darkened interior with a hint of illumination on the left. It provides a good foil for the double subject in the foreground.

You’ll probably think the image is too relaxed for Bangkok — and you’d be right. I took it down south, half-way toward the equator in Phuket Town on a very hot day. No glass separates the man from the road, so there is clearly little pollution. I like the way the gilded leaf echoes the shape of the man’s ear. He grasps the window sill with a sense of rightful ownership. In this place he is very much at home.

When there is sufficient visual information you can tell a lot about the subject. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice that the two men on the scooter are returning from work (the passenger’s hand is covered with dust, the sun is low in the sky), or that the drowsy man by the window takes great care of himself and his home (his freshly styled hair, the recently painted grille).

So it’s important to avoid eliminating too much detail from your image. You can achieve a balance between simplicity and detailed description by looking for plain backgrounds and using them when appropriate. Just don’t expect the background to be as plain as the paper roll in the studio. In street photography every subject needs context. I never like to lose it completely.

Take One Shot, Get Multiple Subjects

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I read in the papers recently that a sniper, tasked with protecting the President of France, accidentally fired his rifle into a hospitality tent, injuring not only a waiter and but also one of the guests. His Inspecteur Clouseau-style achievement did not go unnoticed. Getting two people with one shot was remarkable — and hard to do, whether using a gun or a camera.

When I succeed in getting two or (even better) three or four subjects into the frame at the same time I feel very satisfied. It’s just what street photography needs: the sense that a lot of significant things are happening at the same time.

The word “significant” is important because it’s no use merely to include bystanders who contribute nothing to the picture. They have to be doing something recognisable, even if it’s only inspecting an artwork, like the man on the left of my featured image (above). By himself he would be of no account, but add the girl peeping out behind the taxi rider, together with the boy who is glancing back over his shoulder, and suddenly you get a complete scenario. It’s late afternoon on Charoen Krung, the oldest street in Bangkok.

Incidentally, don’t worry if my image looks a bit “Indian.” This area of Bangkok has long been an outpost of Indian culture, even though most people on the street are the usual mix of Thai and Chinese.

When you start getting multiple subjects in one shot you’re definitely on the final volume of the street photographer’s guidebook. I’d place it alongside concepts like “layers” and “multiple decisive moments,” both of which I cover or intend to cover in this blog. However, if you’re just starting to do street photography, please don’t look exclusively for this type of shot. Begin with one subject and build up from there.

Another Example

Here’s another example, one that’s more easily obtained because the subjects have not been caught in dramatic poses. The four figures are, however, nicely spaced — which separates them so that we can see each one has a distinctive personality of her own. The shopkeeper of the Chinese funerary goods store hovers discreetly in the background while the four customers respectfully browse the wares.

Had the customers been all bunched up and overlapping — as they usually are in photos — the image would be less successful. As it is, we can see unrelated strangers from three generations, all of them concerned about holding ceremonies for the wider family which includes those who have passed. The kaleidoscopic colours are every bit as solemn as the greys and blacks of European mourning — and so easily misinterpreted by westerners.

Useful tip: if you shoot in black and white it’s probably best to avoid this subject.

On a few occasions I’ve come across multiple subjects that were too far apart to get into the same shot. That can be very frustrating. For example, while taking pictures of a very small temple that was entirely enclosed by tree roots I suddenly noticed a man walking past with a large poodle in a shoulder bag — and beyond him a monk leading a water buffalo into the compound of another temple. I eventually got all the shots, but alas, each one is separate from the others.

Finding a Strategy

You’re probably going to ask me how to devise a strategy that will allow you to get several subjects into one shot. There no sure-fire way of doing it; you just have to be patient.

With the featured photo (at the top of this post) I always had in mind an image that included the piece of sculpture on the left. I was hoping to snap pedestrians as they drew level with it, thus getting them in sharp focus along with the sculpture. By chance, traffic emerged from the side street and one motor-bike was obliged to swerve around another, giving the impression of heading straight for the camera. In fact, I was standing safely on the sidewalk and the bike was obliged to turn on to the main road — or else leap the kerb and run me over (as the passenger seems to anticipate).

Here’s my final picture (below) to illustrate the topic of “multiple subjects with one shot.” I call it “Incident at the Flower Market.”

The man and woman on the left have a lively dispute or perhaps they’re sharing a joke. Whatever they’re doing is of no concern whatsoever to the woman sitting in the red chair. She’s calculating something, pen in hand, and looking out of the frame to the right. Her gaze helps to pull the viewer’s attention towards the centre, which is just what I wanted to achieve.

Although she’s not stepping forward and speaking (like the man) or reacting with incredulity (like the woman in the centre), the woman in the red chair with her intensely blue apron and wine-coloured cardigan is both the quietest and loudest figure in the photo. She sits silently but her clothes and chair shout out loud to us. In this sense, although she’s not part of the action, she’s one of the main subjects of the picture — perhaps the most important one. Fortunately, she doesn’t upset the composition, being within a brightly coloured context of dozens of flowers.

It Must Work As a Whole

When you succeed in getting several subjects into one shot you still have to make sure the picture works as a whole. Admittedly, our art form is very forgiving in the sense that people don’t expect compositions to have the monumentality of, say, a Raphael painting, where every figure is precisely positioned. It’s even OK to allow the frame to cut a figure in two if the rest of the composition hangs together. But a satisfying image can never be a jumble of activity, like a frame taken at random from Google Street View.

The task of the street photographer is to distill order from chaos, to make clear what may be unclear to the inattentive eye, and to preserve moments in time recorded from the photographer’s unique viewpoint.

Ultimately, the success or failure of your composition with multiple subjects depends on the balance you achieve between the separation of those subjects and the unity of the image.

I…hope…that’s…clear.

When Your Street Photo Has More Than One Decisive Moment

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Forget the fuss about “layers” (receding planes with subjects of interest in them). If you want to engage in virtuoso street photography how about taking up “multiple decisive moments”?

As everyone knows, “The Decisive Moment” was the American title of the 1952 book by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The French title, “Images à la Sauvette,” means images taken hurriedly, or “on the sly” — candid images, if you will.

The book contained 126 photographs made between 1932 and 1952, among them some magnificent portraits and distant landscapes that could have been taken at another moment and still have been as good.

Yet it’s not Cartier-Bresson’s portraits that made the biggest impact on photography. It was his action shots, especially the iconic one of a man about to step into a large puddle of water behind Gare Saint Lazare.

The idea of freezing a moment and making it seem in some way significant brought out the best in photography. In fact, it’s what photography does better than any other art form. Painters may achieve a similar effect (like Titian with his “Bacchus and Ariadne“) but you know he’s had to do it laboriously by drawing an outline and filling it stroke by stroke with colour. By contrast, the camera’s shutter snatches the actual moment, tears it from the flux of time and enables it to live forever.

Now we come to the question, how long is a decisive moment?

In Cartier-Bresson’s most famous image it cannot be more than a tiny fraction of a second. His subject’s foot is barely a centimetre from the surface of the water. There’s quite a lot of motion blur in the figure, indicative of the briskness of the man’s movement. So let’s say the moment lasts for a hundredth of a second, maybe less.

I have a second question. What are the chances of taking a photograph in which there are not one but two or more decisive moments occurring at the same time? Will they still be decisive in the sense of seeming to be significant? Or will they confuse the eye and create a disturbing conflict within the image?

So many questions! I’m sorry about that, but we’re now veering towards the extreme edges of street photography where the entire process becomes a white knuckle ride.

For example, in my featured photo “Transaction” (above) I show some people buying food at a market stall. On a busy day, Bangkok street sellers behave like newsagents in New York — they serve more than one customer at a time. The woman in the yellow tee has just paid for her goods and the man is letting go of them (Decisive Moment One). As she begins to turn away she notices my camera and grimaces (Decisive Moment Two).

Meanwhile (there’s more!) the vendor is accepting notes from another customer at the bottom left of the frame (Decisive Moment Three) while the customer gestures with his forefinger and makes a comment (Decisive Moment Four). All these moments seem to combine into one decisive “super-moment” — a bit like those super-volcanoes with lots of vents, each capable of spewing out pure energy at the same time.

I’ve looked through my pictures to see if I can find some similar shots but there’s nothing that comes close. Maybe these multiple decisive moments are truly rare. I have plenty of crowd scenes, like the one below, in which various people are caught mid-gesture as they walk quite rapidly outside Charing Cross station in London. Yet their gestures are perhaps too subtle and too distant to be of real significance in the photo. Let me explain.

At the centre of the image three people are walking in different directions. They are perilously close to each other yet none of them seems the least bit worried. They’ve already calculated each other’s speed and direction and have no fear of collision. The girl in the micro-shorts places a protective hand on the bag that hangs from her right shoulder. In exactly the same way, the man in the purple tee protects the Canon camera slung from his left shoulder. Meanwhile, a girl in a butch leather jacket puts her arm around her friend’s neck as the two of them head off towards the Strand.

In this picture everyone is caught mid-step, except for the man looking at the second-hand goods on the right. Again, the whole image is a super-moment, but, like so many others, composed of micro-decisive moments rather than any of real significance.

I think there is still potential for developing street photography, even though eighty years or more have elapsed since Cartier-Bresson was first experimenting with decisive moments. One way we can move forward is to put ourselves in situations where significant moments occur frequently. However, you need to be close enough to the action so that two or three instances will be prominently featured in the image.

One further word of explanation: it’s not sufficient to photograph, say, a football crowd in which everyone is cheering in a slightly different way. They’re all cheering for the same reason, so it’s essentially the same moment. What I have in mind is when people are on different trajectories, when each frozen movement seems unrelated to the others, despite their proximity in space and their sharing of the identical moment of time.

If my concept of “multiple decisive moments” taken with a single shot seems contradictory to you, I can only say it’s my recognition that everyone carries their own time with them. Sometimes, separate moments from separate lives occur simultaneously.

From now on, I’ll start looking out for them. When I get another one I’ll let you know.

Can Your Street Photo Be Devoid of People?

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I need to clarify some thoughts about the presence of people in street photos by asking: “Are people really necessary?”

I’m firmly of the belief that anyone embarking on the artform of street photography must concentrate on taking candid shots of people in public places. To do otherwise is to shun the basic principles of the genre and revert to being a general photographer whose portfolio includes flowers, trees, portraits, landscapes and more or less anything that makes a good picture.

However, I’m open to other ideas and I’ve recently been reading Michael Ernest Sweet’s admirable e-book “The Street Photography Bible.” In this he takes delight in quoting the Wikipedia definition of street photography, which includes the phrase: “The subject can even be absent of any people…”

The Wikipedia definition goes on to say that the image can depict a place “…where an object projects a human character or an environment is decidedly human.” In other words, the photo need only evoke a human presence; there is no need for the street photographer to include human beings in the image.

Maybe there’s no necessity for a street to be present, either.

The other day I was browsing some aerial shots of southern England with its manicured fields and network of roads and it occurred to me that nothing in the landscape looked natural. Over thousands of years the entire terrain has been carved up, worked and reworked, crops planted and harvested, houses constructed, destroyed, and reconstructed. Not a spare corner remains untouched or unmanaged.

An aerial picture of southern England is not a street photo, but it fulfills all the criteria of the Wikipedia definition.

I take Michael Ernest Sweet’s point that some photographers who are recognised specifically as “street photographers” — notably Daidō Moriyama — have shown images in which people are completely absent, but I’m still not persuaded by his arguments.

What Moriyama offers us is not individual photos but an entire experience: a vision of the teeming night life of Tokyo and Osaka. He collects his work into books and exhibits, into mixes and remixes. He leaves us with an abiding impression of life in the raw, of survival against the odds. In such an oeuvre, a few images need to be devoid of people, otherwise the cacophony of voices would be too exaggerated and would drown each other out.

So yes, Moriyama has photographed, as Michael Ernest Sweet says: “signs, posters, dogs, cats, mountains…” At this point I have to remind everyone that Moriyama is not a self-styled “street photographer.” It’s the world that has categorised him as such. A better epithet would be “artist” — an artist who reacts to the life around him and who finds ways of pinning it to the page.

Moriyama is closer in spirit to Japanese writers like Kafū Nagai than to many street photographers. Kafū wrote masterful descriptions of the same disreputable areas frequented by Moriyama. He was also responsible for my all-time favourite quotation: “…the world has become a most inconvenient place for people who walk in the shade.”

I certainly agree that many inanimate objects show an intimate relationship with human beings and can therefore become a subset of street photography. My featured image (at the top of the page) goes a little further in picturing some bar stools and an actual representation: a wooden figure of a human being.

Are inanimate objects the proper subject of street photography? Of course not. Like Moriyama’s signs and posters they may often be intrinsically interesting and could well form the material for a book or an exhibition, perhaps even without any pictures of human beings. I recommend (in my “100 Top Tips”) that street photographers turn their cameras on such objects from time to time. But our main focus has to be on people: their interactions, their emotions, their lives.

I once created a photographic project on religion as practised by ordinary people in Thailand. As you can imagine, it’s full of temples and worshippers, monks and supplicants. Yet one of my favourite images from it is this one (below) of the simplest possible shrine: a street vendor’s incense burner on top of a wooden stool. I saw it standing in a shaft of sunlight and felt moved to take the photo.

In a collection of other works — mainly photos of people but including some magnificent temples — the humble stool takes on a noble character. I suppose you could call it a “street photo in spirit,” and it was through taking this kind of shot that I decided to focus on the life of the street rather than on those more spectacular scenes which usually attract the photographer’s eye.

So in answer to the question: “Can Your Street Photo Be Devoid of People?” I would have to say: “Yes, if you’re creating a body of work that needs inanimate detail to complete the story.” But please make people your main subject, otherwise you’ll merely be a still life photographer. You might as well stay indoors!

What Is Street Photography?

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I have to begin by asking: what is a “street”?

Clearly, the sidewalks of New York, Chicago, Paris and Beijing are places where you can practice what everyone would agree is “street photography.”

If you visit London and walk down a covered street such as Burlington Arcade that, too, would be a place where classic street photography is possible.

If a covered street is OK, then how about a mall? And if a mall, then what about inside a shop or an underground train station?

How about on board an ocean-going cruise ship? Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas has shops, cafés and bars, not to mention a “Coney Island-style boardwalk” and an area called Central Park with 12,000 real shrubs.

You see, the terms and definitions of street photography are not as obvious as they first appear, even when they relate only to the possible locations where this kind of photography can be conducted. When we start to consider the style and content of the resulting photographs, the definitions become even more blurred.

The Impromptu Portrait
Let’s say you’re walking down the street, camera in hand, when you spot someone sitting against a wall. The light is great, the colours perfect — say, multiple shades of brown — and you take a shot.

The trouble is: the guy is looking down and you can’t see his face. What do you do? You can walk past and find another shot. Alternatively, you can speak to the subject (as I did, for the photo below) and say: “Hi, the light is so good here I just have to take a picture.” He beams at you and you get a beautiful street portrait that’s perfectly composed because you had time to do it.

But is the posed street portrait really an example of genuine street photography?

What about all those shots that people take during “Fashion Week” in London, New York or Paris. Amateur and professional photographers alike find rich pickings when they take pictures of stylish visitors going to and from these events. Extrovert fashionistas are willing participants and the photographs in which they appear look all the more cool for showing them out on the street rather than at some indoor event where outrageous dressing is commonplace.

You can take a narrow view of street photography by insisting that it has to be done outside on the street, with people who are unaware of your presence and therefore unable to adjust their appearance to suit the camera. Or you can take a broad view and allow everything: including interior locations and posed shots.

A Personal View
I like to photograph in malls, shops, stations, or any place where people go about their business, but in my serious work (not impromptu portraits like I’ve just discussed) I’m strictly kosher when it comes to candid versus posed.

I share the aesthetic of art critic Michael Fried who emphasises the tradition in Western art of depicting people who are absorbed in what they’re doing. As soon as the presence of the photographer disengages the subject from his or her ongoing activity the result is a fake, theatrical image. It’s an image in which the subject plays to the camera, destroying that instrument’s unique capacity for objectivity.

A Broader View
Do I enjoy looking at other people’s impromptu street portraits? Yes, I do. I wouldn’t necessarily exclude them from an exhibition of street photography. The genre needs to be as broad as possible, but not so broad as to be meaningless.

For example, take the work of Anders Petersen, a photographer who talks and interacts with his subjects to achieve work that has a remarkable intimacy and impact. His approach has to be valid in a broad context, but it’s not one I personally wish to pursue. It invites the viewer to collaborate in the invasion of the subject’s privacy. I think it lies on one of the extreme boundaries of street photography: the one where content dominates form, perhaps to the detriment of both.

With or Without People?
Can we say that a photograph of a deserted street really belongs to the genre of street photography? Surely not. It’s just a street. If it has a distant figure or two…well, maybe.

In its most concentrated form — in what I might call “hardcore street photography” — our art form is all about getting pictures of people as they walk, run, chat, scream, snarl, fight, linger or hurry along the city streets.

Without people you’re left with nothing but their ghostly traces: posters, cigarette ends, discarded packaging, street furniture and the built environment.

Arriving at a Definition
Are we there yet? No, I don’t think anyone will ever define street photography with perfect precision, certainly not without taking a narrow view of it.

Here’s the closest I can get. It’s photographing strangers in a public environment in order to create meaningful or aesthetically pleasing images.

Even this broadly inclusive definition has its faults. What about images taken from the street that peep into people’s private homes (Arne Svenson)? What about your own reflection (Vivian Maier)? Or your own shadow (Lee Friedlander)? What about taking people in their cars (Óscar Monzón)? What about photographing strangers at a pre-appointed time (Shizuka Yokomizo)?

Here’s another definition. It’s just candid photography! That’s not too scary, is it?

How Do You Choose the Right Camera for Street Photography?

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I’ve recently been working on a guide called “The 10 Best Cameras for Street Photography — and Why,” trying to reduce quite a long list of excellent cameras to a manageable number. The task has reminded me of the difficulty everyone experiences when trying to decide on the “next purchase.”

Do you choose using gut feel and intuition, or do you opt for scientific investigation and set about researching the subject more fully? A lot of people do the latter, then revert to the former option and go with their initial choice.

Here’s what I do. I use a text editor to create a single page called (unsurprisingly) “Next Purchase.” On it I type (or cut and paste) all the relevant details of each camera and lens I’m considering. When I check prices I make a note of them together the name of the retailer and the date.

Everything goes on to this page: notes about lenses and useful accessories; little quotes from reviewers; weight comparisons; even a list of my criteria, which tend to change over time, depending on the kind of photography I wish to do.

Here’s my three-step strategy for finding the camera that will best suit your needs:

* Make a list of your criteria
* Prioritise the items on the list
* Find the camera that best matches them

Step One
You may discover that you have a very long list of criteria, raising the possibility that you’ll need to compromise eventually. Here’s my full list. You may have other items to add to it:

* (Great) image quality
* (Large) sensor size
* (Light) weight of camera
* (Small) size of camera
* (Comfortable) grip
* (Robust) build quality
* (Preferred) focal length of fixed/interchangeable lens
* (Light) weight of interchangeable lenses
* (Wide) aperture of lens
* (Responsive) autofocus capabilities
* (Superior) colour handling
* (Well organised) ergonomics and menu structures
* (Included) image stabilization (in body or lens)
* (High) LCD quality
* (Included) environmental sealing
* (Good) resistance to flare
* (Rapid) start-up time
* (Acceptable) price

Some of the above criteria, like “resistance to flare,” apply to the lens rather than the camera. I’m assuming that you may be considering cameras with interchangeable lenses as well as those with fixed lenses.

Because it’s such a long list you could give numerical values to the criteria: such as using a scale of 1-10. This way you’ll end up with a more accurate result than if you simply assume a similar gap between each criterion.

Say, for example, image quality is by far the most important factor in your choice. If it’s way out in front it needs to be weighted to show that it’s far ahead of the one you’ve listed as being the second most important.

Step Two
Your next step is to reduce this list to manageable proportions. Think about it carefully then choose the top five criteria you consider to be the most important.

Here are my key criteria for street photography:

1. Great image quality
2. Very light weight
3. Resistance to flare
4. Superior colour handling
5. Responsive autofocus

How did I arrive at this shortlist? I did it mainly by seeing if there were any workarounds or other factors that would allow me to eliminate any of the criteria. For example, the absence of a comfortable grip on the Leica Q would not put me off buying the camera because you can add a grip to it. Likewise, rapid start-up time may be desirable but it’s not essential if, as I do, you always have your camera switched on when working.

Alas, there are no workarounds for the basics: the quality of the sensor and the weight of the camera plus lens: the two criteria which, for me, are the most important.

Step Three
You now have to read lots of reviews and find out which camera most closely matches your final set of criteria. That can take a while, but it’s well worth the effort because you can learn such a lot from reading informed opinion together with technical specs.

Eventually you can start to make a shortlist of the cameras under serious consideration. Again, I think it’s a good idea to take notes. The human mind keeps only seven or eight facts under simultaneous consideration, but we’re dealing with too many in this instance.

Here’s another suggestion. Write down what you think are the two best qualities of each camera on your shortlist and the two worst. Can you live with the worst?

I wrote down the best/worst qualities a while back (2016), adding a fifth line: a note of any outstanding comment by reviewers. Here’s what I compiled for two of the cameras I had under consideration.

Leica Q — 640g
1. Best thing about it: It’s a photographer’s camera and great fun to use. Lightweight AND full frame.
2. Next best thing about it: Great fixed 28mm lens.
3. Worst thing about it: It’s a bit cumbersome/hard to hold; rocks forward when trying to stand upright.
4. Next worst thing about it: Can I live with a fixed 28mm lens?
5. What they say about it: Image quality doesn’t match the Sony cameras, but ergonomics are way better.

Fuji X-100F — 469 g
1. Best thing about it: Super compact and lightweight.
2. Next best thing about it: Well engineered.
3. Worst thing about it: Has the same lens as the much cheaper X-100T, X-100S and X-100. (But it’s a good lens).
4. Next worst thing about it: The so-called X-Trans “problem” – waxy faces if you boost shadows, etc.
5. What they say about it: Very highly rated; a bit “niche”; for pro’s on their day off.

 

After all my efforts to find a street camera to replace my Canon 5DIII and pancake lens (a hard-to-beat combination!) I decided to wait a bit longer. It was the right decision.

So if you’re tormenting yourself by trying to evaluate hundreds of scraps of information about the latest cameras, try to bring some order to the task. Think it through along the lines I suggest. I hope you make the right decision.

[Note about the featured image: I was using my Canon 5DIII on this trip to Paris. Disconcertingly, the reflection of the burglar-proof grille from across the road looks like banding in the shadows. It’s not! But I love those rabbits.]

 

Will Anyone Want to Look At Our Street Photos 500 Years From Now?

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I like to think that people will still want to look at our street photos in the distant future, say, 500 years from now.

Why would they want to do that? For the same reasons we look at paintings from 500 years ago: chiefly for their artistic quality but also for what they tell us about the past.

Take, for example, the sublime “Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam” painted by Quentin Matsys in 1517. So that’s what the best-selling author of the early 16th century looked like! Erasmus wrote “In Praise of Folly” and numerous other works, capitalising on the invention of the printing press to such an extent that he’d written most of the printed books in circulation. We can be confident his likeness is accurate because he looks much the same in a portrait by Hans Holbein.

1517 was the very height of the High Renaissance and you don’t need to look far to find dozens of masterpieces created in that year: Raphael’s “Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary;” Andrea del Sarto’s “Madonna of the Harpies;” Lorenzo Lotto’s “Susanna and the Elders.” Even Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was finished in 1517 after nearly fifteen years of intermittent work.

So, how many people look at the Mona Lisa today? Well, just about everyone — although most visitors to the Louvre seem to snap it with their cellphones. Wasn’t it Erasmus who said: “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king”? With our cameras we’re all a bit one-eyed today!

Pessimists will predict that if there’s anyone left on Earth in 2517 they’ll probably have more pressing things to do than look at street photography from 500 years ago. Will our descendents be huddling in underground shelters, taking refuge from nuclear fallout? Or will they be preparing for a voyage to the stars? Maybe they’ll all be in prison, locked up there by a small clique of uber-rich who own 100 per cent of the world’s resources.

Whatever they doing, I’m wondering what they’ll make of today’s street photos — our images taken in public spaces of people in their everyday clothes, pursuing pleasure and business. I like to think they’ll get some insight into what it’s like to be alive today. They’ll see wealth and poverty, often side by side. They’ll notice what we eat, how we travel, how we dress.

If anyone looks at my own pictures they’ll see we often go shopping, although they’ll probably be puzzled by the extraordinary difference between shopping in a street market and being welcomed to an upmarket department store with full ceremonial honours (see my featured image, above). Perhaps they’ll think the girls in my picture are religious supplicants entering a temple of worship. They won’t be very far wrong.

Personally, I’m not a pessimist. I tend towards being a “rational optimist” in the Matt Ridley sense (Google his book), despite there being so many setbacks as time moves on. In fact, I rather think that people in 2517 will be far more interested in our street photography than in most of the artworks with which our contemporary galleries are stuffed. In 500 years time, Matt Stuart’s pigeons will make more sense than Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.

In 2517 there could be an enthusiasm for period drama, just as we enjoy Elizabethan drama today. When Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was adapted for television the production team researched surviving visual material from the era in which it is set (1500-1535). I’m sure this task will become a lot easier in 2517 when our photographs will be instantly available to those who need the information they contain. Immersive movies could have sets made from our street photos, digitally reconstructed from the millions of images we bequeath to posterity.

The world in 2517 will be unimaginably different from what it is today. In the worst-case scenario (asteroid hit, nuclear war, uncontrollable climate change, virulent disease, or robotic takeover) our street photos may exist only in digital form, streaming their way across the vast expanses of space, to be seen eventually in a distant galaxy by bug-eyed aliens who will puzzle over the way we travel, the way we dress — and our strange head gear.