Analysis

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.

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.

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.

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.