Opinion

If you exclude photos of people “smiling for the camera” in non-candid shots there are relatively few images of happy faces in street photography.

Wondering if this thought is really true I checked several street photo hashtags on Instagram and the results confirmed it. Everyone is very serious on #urbanstreetphotography and a lot of the subjects are downright miserable on #streetscenesmag. I scrolled down to view hundreds of photos on #ourstreets before coming to the first happy face – and that one belonged to a dog.

I’m not sure how to account for this phenomenon, because there are quite a lot of happy faces in my own pictures. As I walk around London or Bangkok I see plenty of people having fun, sharing a joke, or ribbing each other about something. Even people walking alone, chatting on their phones, will occasionally stop and chuckle (although I admit I more often hear them shouting expletives down the phone, cursing whoever is on the other end of it).

If there are plenty of happy people on the street but very few in street photographs I can only come to one conclusion: photographers have an agenda which is biased towards misery. Even when they’re not depicting the disadvantaged, the homeless, or those in need of something a bit more substantial than getting their picture taken, photographers are showing emotionless people who seem to be downtrodden by the weight of city life.

Come On, Cheer Up!
My own pictures have an unusually high proportion of happy faces in them. I’m drawn to any display of emotion because it helps to make a good shot. Fortunately, in London and Bangkok there are more positive, happy emotions on public streets than negative, hostile emotions – even during political demonstrations. (Alas, that has not been the case in yellow-shirted Paris this year).

For example, take the featured image at the top of the page. In this shot there are at least five demonstrably happy people and one other who seems to be quietly smiling to himself. Yes, a couple of them have seen the camera, but their smiles are not forced in any way. They were clearly in a good mood at the time, perhaps because they were heading towards the ferry for a pleasant trip on the river.

In the photo immediately above, the three girls in the foreground certainly haven’t noticed the camera, but they’re smiling and laughing at something they’re seen in the distance. In this instance, the crowd of people are walking towards a street festival, so, once again, everyone’s anticipating a good time.

You could say that I’m drawn to those occasions when people are likely to be in a cheerful mood — and you wouldn’t be wrong.

So Why Is Street Photography So Often Sombre?
I think the absence of joyful emotions in street photography could be because of conscious or unconscious awareness of photojournalistic images – and a desire by street photographers to emulate their high seriousness. I’ve often referred to street photography as “photojournalism lite,” and I suspect this holds true for a large proportion of it.

I hasten to add that there are many great images in the sombre style, together with many “deadpan” images that are neither happy nor sad. But that’s the whole point! Street photography needs to be all-embracing if it’s to reflect an accurate picture of life in today’s cities.

So the point I’m trying to make is this: life in modern cities is much more enjoyable than street photography (in general) would suggest. Even in the crowded streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown, where it’s tough to sell and hard work to shop, people can still pause in the streets and double up with laughter, like the lady in my photograph below. Really, the streets are not all doom and gloom.

The new, wedge-shaped security barriers around Leicester Square have been given a makeover by London-based artist Charlotte Posner. Her brilliantly quirky and colourful work is said to be “highly collectable” but I doubt if anyone will be walking away with these particular examples anytime soon. The barriers are designed to protect us from truck bombs driven into the square at speed.

Taking street photos in London back in the summer I got a few shots of people walking through the barrier, including the featured image (above) which links up with my previous post called “Holding Hands.” I guess these two come into the “slightly ostentatious” category: showing off their coupleness to all who notice.

Charlotte Posner
Together with assistants, the artist herself was still at work when I visited (above), signing her creations. Her art is witty and very London: featuring a cosmopolitan collection of characters, sometimes bedecked or even fused with iconic London landmarks. They all have a cheerful, touristy feel, alongside images of burgers, strawberries and pizza — inspired by the summer but certain to lift the spirits in winter as well.

Having exhibited around the world, in Japan, Lahore, Hong Kong, New York and Singapore, Charlotte Posner has also attracted attention here at home. She has been featured on the BBC Culture Show and has shown her work at the Battersea Affordable Art Fair. Her art is undoubtedly commercial: more decorative and less political than, say, Banksy’s graffiti — and likely to appeal to a wide audience.

Taking the Photos
The barriers themselves, being low, are tricky to photograph because they trap the viewer’s attention and tend to conflict with the faces and expressions of the passers-by. As a result, I found myself taking pictures of legs (fortunately, one of my favourite motifs), all the while hoping that a shapely leg would soon enter the frame. It did (below).

Here, at one of the busiest places in London, you can expect to find thousands of tourists flocking to the shops and cinemas at this time of year. Even while the artist was still putting the finishing touches to her work, quite a few teenagers were climbing all over it for selfies (below).

You can’t blame them. It’s just concrete, steel, paint and inspiration. It’ll withstand the assault of sneakered feet clambering on top of it, at least for a while. I guess I should return to see how it’s bearing up.

If you’d like to see more of Charlotte Posner’s work, her website is here.

People are by far and away the best subject for street photography and I prefer to photograph them when they’re engrossed in some kind of activity.

Why? Mainly because they’re less likely to be bothered by the camera, so I can get a truly candid shot — but also because they reveal a little bit more about themselves in the way they conduct their chosen activity.

I’m not saying you can’t get a great shot of people doing nothing. Perhaps someone is looking into thin air, lost in thought. Depending on other factors that could be a terrific photo. Yet, after a while, the do-nothing shot becomes tedious because it’s so static. Yes, they’re trapped in a moment of time, but it’s a long moment — and we’re trapped in there with them.

Which brings me to the subject of ice cream.

At Least They’re Doing Something
On a summer foray into the streets of London’s West End I encountered a lot of people eating ice cream. It had never occurred to me before that such activity could be a proper subject for street photography, but I now think it is.

I think the featured image (above) is intriguing because I’m not sure what’s going on. Is the man about to take a bite of the Mint Choc Waffle? Or is he inspecting it to see if there’s something unpleasant embedded in the top of it? Why can’t his partner bear to look? Or has something caught her attention off-frame?

Although the scene itself is utterly mystifing we know everything else about it. For example, it’s labelled with the location: Seven Dials, a short distance from Bloomsbury and the British Museum. We even know exactly what sort of ice cream it is: a Mint Choc Waffle — one of the vendor’s most popular waffles, being twice illustrated on the side of the van.

I’m always talking about the value of contrast within a street photo and the above shot is a rare example of informational contrast: a surfeit of information about the context of the action, but very little about the action itself.

The End of the Ice Cream
The two young women eating ice cream in the next shot are doing so in unison. That always makes for a good photo, especially when the subjects are clearly relishing the experience.

In this instance, we appear to have joined the activity just as it’s coming to an end. They’re both getting the last lick of enjoyment from it, emerging into the open area away from the market to embark on their next adventure.

It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll
Only one of the two gentlemen in the shot below is actually eating his ice cream. The other one is probably looking forward to sitting down to enjoy it at his leisure. Again, it’s given us a nice contrast between the two subjects, quite apart from the fact that one is wearing black-and-white and other’s in red.

Are they perhaps rock musicians, or stage managers? If so they probably thought I was from the paparazzi, but they didn’t break their stride.

Above the shoulder of man with the red tee-shirt (depicting our evolution from ape to rock star) is Hew Locke’s wonderful sculpture of the moon goddess Selene on the facade of the Nadler Hotel. She represents sleep.

Sleep is the epitome of inactivity and not nearly as photogenic as rock ‘n roll — or eating ice cream, for that matter.

In Part One of this three-part post I mentioned some famous people with whom Ipswich is associated: Cardinal Wolsey, and so on. Now, in this second part, I want to start by adding one more, namely Giles the Cartoonist.

Ronald “Carl” Giles OBE (1916–95) drew political and social cartoons for the Daily Express newspaper from 1943 until 1989. He was immensely famous in his day, particularly for the characters he created, such as Chalkie the vicious schoolmaster, and Larry, the kid next door. But by far his most fondly remembered character is Grandma, a woman who bore an unnerving resemblance to a distant relative in my own family (my mother’s first husband’s mother — definitely not a blood relation!)

Up from London
Giles was a Londoner, born in Islington, but after his marriage he and his wife moved to a village near Ipswich. He travelled into town to work in an office in the town centre. Today, there’s a large statue of a figure looking up at the office where he drew his cartoons. However, the figure is not of Giles himself. It’s a bronze statue of Grandma (above).

For a long time I’ve wanted to include a reference to Giles in the pictures I’ve taken in Ipswich, but to be honest, the dark and somewhat forbidding statue doesn’t really lend itself to street photography. I made a few more attempts but I couldn’t improve on the featured image above. Fortunately, a different opportunity presented itself when a photo of the sculpture appeared on the hoarding that surrounded Cornhill during its recent redevelopment.

Working the Scene
The image gave me a chance to used the time-honoured street photography technique of “working the scene.” The resulting shots are not too bad: they show the good people of Ipswich going about their business in a relaxed manner on a nice sunny day (as above).

I found the experience cathartic, not least because Giles’s cartoons always struck me as rather depressing, being rooted in war and deprivation. He had been, after all, an official “war artist” and was deeply traumatised by scenes he saw in the death camps during the Liberation.

There’s little doubt about Giles’s own “dark side.” For example, in 1980 he depicted the universally loved Rubert Bear dangling from a noose in the background of a published cartoon. (Giles’s editors didn’t notice).

So, in each of the three images I’m showing here, there’s feisty old Grandma – a solid bronze ghost from another era. She was notorious for her old-fashioned views: such as her support for the death penalty and public flogging. She terrorised her family, rode a motorbike, went skiing, and even played the tuba. The British public became very fond of her.

I’m not sure which of the images I prefer, but maybe a composite of the top (featured image) and the one below would have been nice. It would have given me the young mum with her pram plus the lady in front of Grandma in the same image. Of course, it’s not kosher to do that sort of thing in street photography. Apparently.

Come On, Ipswich. Cheer Up!
Apart from the presence of Grandma, the pictures I’ve shown so far are quite cheerful and upbeat. Yet sometimes it seems as though this large Suffolk town is mired in gloom: when the sky is overcast and Market Day unusually quiet, or when the football team gets relegated to a lower division. On days such as those the inhabitants respond by wearing their most lurid outfits, like the one below.

Yes, you can easily get depressed in Ipswich simply by waiting for the mobile Vegan Restaurant to open. I took the shot (below) as I was making my way to the station in the early evening.

I’m not sure if the person kneeling in front of the van is actually waiting for it to open, but it’s certainly possible. The slogan on her bag says: “Caution. I could burst into song at any moment.”

An alternative way of cheering up is to make an expensive purchase, perhaps after browsing the jeweller’s window. Somehow it’s reassuring to see a guy with a Motorhead tee-shirt checking out the engagement rings before going on to “Shop With Confidence” (see below). To judge by the heavy discounting he’ll get it at a good price.

Now I’m wondering if I should extend this article to a third part, as I’ve plenty of pictures remaining in my Ipswich folder. For this concluding part I think I’ll go back to looking at this town’s sunny side. After all, the team has started winning again. I’ll banish all the horror tee-shirts, the doom-and-gloom, and the dreadful if “much loved” Grandma.

A while back I wrote a blog post called “The Streets Are Surreal” in which I drew attention to the increasingly surreal qualities of contemporary street sculptures, advertising, and people’s dress and accessories.

Today I want to look at something else: at images which are only a little bit surreal. I want to think about those in which the contents seem very slightly “off.”

Off? I mean off-key, or out-of-the-ordinary, unusual in a hard-to-define way. After all, if you could define it in words you wouldn’t really need a photo at all. Street photography should, at the very least, say something which you can’t put into words.

In the end, I believe, it comes down to feeling. Surrealism is all about hard-to-define feelings. The surrealist image reaches down into the subconscious, awakening feelings that we don’t experience in the normal course of events. Salvador Dali’s drooping watches, for example, seem to be melting like wax, evoking memories of dreams in which time slows down or dissolves altogether.

Opposite Skechers
The featured image above was sufficiently mystifying to prevent me from finding a title for it, so I called it “Opposite Skechers” for obvious reasons. Hopefully, the obviousness of the title runs counter to the content of the image.

I find the picture unusual in several ways, all of them exaggerated by the low viewpoint (I was standing at the bottom of some steps). The girl in the foreground is picking her way carefully, trying to avoid tumbling down the steps as she walks past the other pedestrians. Her knee-length shoulder bag is surreal in itself, but then, so are the huge, bright red headphones. This person has certainly accessorised herself into surreality.

There are other elements in the image that support the feeling, for example: the two women at either side, their eyeline coinciding with the horizontal Skechers sign. This, too, is unusual – but so are the almost touching noses of two men in the background and the bag which says “time waste” (part of a longer message with a different meaning).

Looking at the people taking short steps while others are pausing and scarcely moving at all, we feel that everything is in slow motion: not quite frozen in time as a photograph normally shows. In other words, the composition is slightly unstable, slightly “off,” slightly surreal.

Dancing on a Waste Bin
In the image immediately above, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood appears to be dancing on top of a waste bin. Of course, we soon notice that she’s just a cut-out figure, affixed to the Kurt Geiger window in the background and probably there to draw attention to her range of shoes and accessories. As the slogan says: “Everything But the Dress,” although the most striking thing about Westwood is (apart from pink hair) her dress.

I say “most striking,” but on reflection the most striking thing about the cutout (as opposed to Vivienne Westwood herself) is its size. It’s considerably larger than life, so it dwarfs the foreground figures even though it’s some distance behind them.

No, the woman near the bin is not wearing a backpack. That belongs to a passer-by, but I think the confusion adds to the slightly surreal feeling of the image. Meanwhile, a man draws his companion’s attention to something across the street. “Look! There’s some normality over there!”

Abnormality Everywhere
In London, you can find both normality and abnormality everywhere. By any standards the Balloon Man (above) is somewhat out-of-the-ordinary. Street photographers and tourists alike can’t resist him, on account of his colourful appearance. I found him so striking that I waited until he walked in front of a plain background (there aren’t too many of those in Oxford Street, but this was one of them).

I think this is where the photographer’s intervention really counts. By taking the balloon seller out-of-context, away from tourists and their children, I’ve made him just a human figure, marching along an empty sidewalk in the middle of nowhere. He’s loaded up with a bundle of balloons which reminds me, slightly, of a rocket launcher: the army’s heavy artillery.

Naturally, I should NOT be reminded of military hardware by a man selling balloons to children, but I can’t get the idea out of my mind. Maybe it’s partly on account of all the metal and concrete in the image, not just the balloons, which are angled correctly for the first salvo.

Stopping Short of the Super Real
I could continue in this same vein, because so many of my pictures are slightly surreal. Sometimes I wonder whether people notice: whether they get the same feeling from them. Certainly it’s not obvious. If it were obvious then the photos would be bizarre (more Diane Arbus) rather than what I’m trying to achieve, which is to depict everyday reality in a slightly, ever-so-slightly, disturbing way.

As the poet T.S. Eliot said: “humankind can not bear very much reality.” When reality becomes too surreal (super real) we tend to freak out. That’s why I prefer merely to drop a few hints, here and there.

I have great affection for England’s country towns, but heavens! they’re having a tough time. The big department stores are ailing. When they’ve all finally closed, as seems inevitable, the shopping heart of every English town will have been ripped out, replaced elsewhere by online stores, distant warehouses and thousands of delivery vans.

It’s not just the department stores either. Most of the smaller, interesting shops, such as those selling hardware items, books and music recordings, or even those offering violin or watch repairs, have been replaced by charity junkshops (as in the picture below), staffed by volunteer workers. Street photography can document the transition by recording these changes that are constantly taking place on the High Street.

Yppswyche
For me, Ipswich in East Suffolk is just a short hop away on the train, so I go there sometimes to take pictures. It’s a town with a proud history, having once belonged to the wife of Edward the Confessor, the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England. It came to be known as Gypeswic or Gyppewicus in the Domesday Book and later as Yppswyche. At school I learned the modern spelling by the mnemonic “I Put Some Water In Charlie’s Hat.” Ipswich.

I should note that the most famous person to emerge from Ipswich was Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s right-hand man, and no one from there has since attained greater heights nor fallen as dramatically.

Other famous people seemed merely to be “passing through,” like the visiting Charles Dickens, or Lord Nelson who was briefly High Steward of the town. An exception was football manager Alf Ramsey who took Ipswich Town to the top of the leagues in 1961/2 before guiding England to World Cup victory a few years later. He’s still in Ipswich, buried in the Old Cemetery.

Old Buildings, New Functions
While there are plenty of new housing estates on the outskirts of Ipswich, the town centre can only repurpose buildings from one function to another. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.

When I was at school in nearby Framlingham one of my greatest delights was to visit the Ancient House Bookshop, housed in a spectacular and historic building which is profusely decorated by wood carvings and plaster mouldings. Structurally, the building is still intact, but the bookshop has gone. Inside, there’s nothing but kitchen equipment, lit by modern light fittings (as my picture, below, shows).

Regeneration
Today, all the talk (and quite a bit of action) is about regeneration: the attempt to drag Ipswich into a prosperous future. Notably, the Waterside at the top of the estuary has been redeveloped, as has the Cornhill, where Queen Mary burned martyrs for their Protestant beliefs in the sixteenth century.

Starting from a low base, Ipswich must surely prosper now that it’s home to a University and many major businesses. The title of my picture below (with a map of the town centre) is “The Only Way Is Up.”

To be continued at a later date!

Couples who wear matching clothes are a great subject for street photography. It’s touching to see this voluntary surrender of individuality, this visual statement of a pact between two human beings, whether they’re kith and kin, or just good friends.

I like to photograph couples in matching clothes because they immediately give the image “a point.” Whatever other qualities the photo may have, at least it’s not a random picture of two people walking down the street.

The onlooker (the person who views the image) can see that I’ve chosen this particular couple quite deliberately in preference to any others. And why? Because they have a vital correspondence between them which is expressed in a visual way. It gives them a back-story and it gives the photo some meaning.

A moment’s thought can explain the charm of a such a photo. Off-camera, before they hit the streets, the couple must have discussed the clothes they’d wear before making their final choice. What we’re seeing is not the result of coincidence.

In my featured image (above) the couple are wearing very distinctive tee-shirts in bright yellow with the words “Heroin Original” on them. I guess that’s a provocative brand-name, but it gives an already “gritty” street photo a bit more bite.

Complex Matching
The more elaborate the match, the more charming it becomes. My photo (below) shows two people in matching tee-shirts, with matching face-masks, worn under the chin in matching style. They’re both wearing similar sandals, but there the correspondence stops. The guy has a backpack; the girl carries a silver bag with Mickey Mouse ears.

When people take matching to extremes, as done by the couple above, the effect starts to become somewhat calculated. The two people in question begin to take on a familial resemblance, like siblings rather than lovers. But why would brother and sister want to dress alike? That’s a mystery to me.

Whereas the “Army Couple” are matching in height as well as dress, in the photo below the guy is much taller than the girl. The Army tees wouldn’t look so good on them!

However, they look much more like a couple, walking hand-in-hand, the guy carrying what is presumably his girl-friend’s bag as well as his own. There’s nothing deliberately calculated in their dress. It’s a uniform! We get a feeling they’ll change into clothes which fit their individual taste at the earliest opportunity.