Analysis

One of the supposed clichés of candid photography is the coffee shop interior, usually somewhere in Paris, with a woman sitting beneath a mirror, looking wistfully at the street outside.

I try to avoid cliché, so my solution is to add tea lounges to the repertoire. You could scarcely have a subject that’s more different.

Greater formality surrounds the drinking of tea, probably because it was the preferred drink of the English upper classes at the end of the eighteenth century when formality was at its height. However, let’s not forget the traditions of tea drinking in Japan where the ritual of making and drinking tea became a rarified art form.

Invitation to a Ritual
Why does tea invite ritual? I have no idea. It must be something to do with the subtlety of its flavour. To obtain the correct flavour you have to follow a certain ritual: warming the pot, letting it stand, and so on. One thing leads to another — and eventually an entire pattern of behaviour emerges, not only in the preparation of tea but also in the drinking of it.

Today, typical up-market tea lounges don’t specify how customers should behave. They simply impose control through the formality of their design. For example, there’s no question of chairs and tables being scattered, higgledy-piggledy (a word I’ve never written before!) around the room. They’re laid out in regular fashion, where customers can sit comfortably but not slumped.

Coffee shops are quite the opposite. They’re relaxed places where casual behaviour is positively encouraged. If you want to do homework or office work in a branch of Starbucks, like the young people in my photo below — that’s fine. You don’t even have to drink coffee: a milk shake will do.

Traditional
It’s hard to find a really traditional tea lounge, especially one where you can take photographs without people objecting. I took my featured image (at the top) in the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. It’s not a tea lounge, as such, but a combined tea/bar/café where journalists sit, talk and write. I think photography was forbidden, but I couldn’t resist. I told myself I was working undercover.

The image is entirely candid. I was taking it to remind myself of the English club-like atmosphere when a waitress showed up with a tray. It’s the nearest I could get to recreating the past at five o’clock in the afternoon.

We are now, of course, a world away from the dirt and dust of the street — because clubs and tea lounges keep themselves apart. They rarely have outdoor tables like the coffee shop. To drink tea and enjoy hushed conversation you need the peace and quiet of being enclosed, preferably on all four sides.

Modern
Genuinely old interiors in the Far East are rapidly disappearing, but there are plenty of new, purpose-built tea lounges in malls and hotels. They tend to be “design-intensive,” using a plethora of decorative items to signal their function.

The photo below shows an “1823 Tea Lounge” belonging to the Ronnefeldt group, a company that has adopted the epithet: “Serving the world’s finest tea since 1823.” As you can deduce, even a modern tea lounge needs traditional credentials to attract customers, despite having over fifty teapots arranged in rows along the walls and counter.

I took the above shot from public space — the mall equivalent of “the street” — without entering the lounge itself. You can see right through the room to further public space beyond.

The image demonstrates all kinds of contradictions, as confirmed by the deceptive reflection of the woman in the centre. It almost looks as though she’s sitting alone, like the man behind her, but she’s actually photographing her partner’s tea. They didn’t do that in…1823.

When I wander off the street and into the park I find the act of taking street photos goes up by a couple of levels of difficulty. People are relaxing and watchful. They notice you more easily and don’t like their downtime interrupted. What’s more: everything’s green.

Nothing looks good against a green background, except tiny patches of intense red and a different shade of green. I guess black’s OK, too, but people rarely dress in black when they go to the park. They put on their “glad rags” and — in my locality at least — go fully armed with the pram, the kids, and the balloons.

The Park Event
If everyday shooting in the park is difficult you have to wait for an event, such as a fair, or “fun run,” before you can feel free enough to take candid snaps. However, the trouble with organised events is the way in which they present you with ready-made subjects that may not be to your liking.

Here in Colchester we have food fairs, “town and country fairs,” medieval fairs (“fayres”), music fairs, Scottish marching band competitions, fireworks displays and 21-gun salutes to celebrate H.M. the Queen’s birthday. Honestly, there are so many events in the park I sometimes wonder how the grass stays as green as it does.

I made a flying visit to the Town and Country Fair, just before closing time when they let you in for free. It’s by far the best time to get decent pictures. The sun is low in the sky, the participants are letting down their hair, and the donkeys are having a well deserved sh*t (featured image, above).

I was surprised to get a nice series of pictures, particularly since I’ve often paid full price on previous occasions and spent the entire afternoon getting nothing. Yes, there was a cute shot of a dog looking out from under a tent — and another of a horse, which I’ll append to the foot of this blog post. But those were exceptions. Organised events, especially when they’re in full swing, don’t seem to yield the kind of subject I like to take.

The Park Non-Event
I really like to photograph people when they’re doing lots of different things, not when they’re spectators of organised sports and entertainments. Left to their own devices, people reveal more about themselves than when a staged event dictates their reactions.

Here (below), for example, is a picture of a typical Sunday afternoon in Castle Park, Colchester. People are sitting, eating, and chatting. Some have gathered together in groups, debating the issues of the day. They’ve brought bicycles, folding chairs, footstools, table cloths — everything for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (Luncheon on the Grass), if not quite in the style of Edouard Manet.

You see what I mean about the small patch of red? The woman making a phone call was fortunately wearing bright red shorts which form a natural focal point at the centre of the picture. Seen against the subtle greenery of Spring (it was early May) the red is particularly striking. Later in the year the green will become more intense and far less photogenic.

The Same Strategies Apply
When you’re taking pictures in the park you can use the same strategies you normally use on the street. You can “work the scene” when you find something that demands it — such as some people engaged in breakdancing or playing “boules.” Or you can try to remain invisible and get candid pictures, like the one above.

As a backdrop, Colchester’s Castle Park offers amazing props for the off-road street photographer. It has the remains of a Roman villa, a medieval castle built on the ruins of a Roman temple, a wall (Roman, of course), and an extraordinary collection of rare trees — including an oak that looks like a poplar.

Inevitably, any pictures you take in a park — particularly one as beautiful as Castle Park — will be “picturesque.” You can’t keep avoiding the trees, walls, and winding pathways which tend to make the image look more suitable for a calendar than for a portfolio of street photography. Yet the park is a public place, full of pedestrians, and it’s undeniably photogenic.

Winter in the Park
Every year the shops stock up with sledges and shovels, but snow falls about once every two or three years. When it does, everyone goes mad with excitement (especially the shopkeepers). The park really comes to life after a snowfall.

As you could see from the previous image, Castle Park has a very steep hill (as does the whole town), making it ideal for messing around on sledges. By ambulance, the local hospital is only a few minutes away, so there’s no need to slow down before you hit the Roman wall at the bottom of the hill.

And Back to Summer
Looking at my final shot you’ll probably think I’ve wandered as far away from the city streets as it’s possible to go. But in fact we’re still in Castle Park, surrounded by thousands of buildings, streets, shops, schools, colleges and a university.

Horses and donkeys are always kind enough to look directly at me, while diverting the glances of spectators away from the camera. That works in my favour. I think this shot captures the moment: both horse and minder are putting their best foot forward. I like the word “style” on the right hand edge of the picture.

My own style of taking pictures in the park seems to revert to classical compositions, quite unlike those I usually take on the street. They sometimes strike me as quaintly old-fashioned, but I don’t really care.

It’s good to have a change. Even a street photographer needs the occasional day off. Our occupation is not always a walk in the park.

They’re one grade down from those “decisive moments” — the hypercritical instances captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Certain actions are so commonplace, so casual and unremarkable in themselves, that it’s pointless to call them “decisive,” even though they may be critical to the image. What are they?

I call them “passing moments.”

My featured image is a good example of a passing moment. The woman in the orange jacket is standing on a street corner in Hong Kong, handing out free newspapers to commuters on their way to work. She repeats her action time and again with each person who passes.

There’s nothing “decisive” about the moment of delivery. In fact, it seems to happen over a period of one or two seconds rather than in an instant. The man approaches; the woman readies the paper. The man gets closer; the woman offers the paper. The man never breaks stride; the woman doesn’t even look at him. The long moment has passed.

I like these passing moments. They give a sense of “life continuing,” rather than “life frozen.” I actually prefer them to Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moments, which are surely an attempt to identify a phenomenon that doesn’t exist beyond the confines of photography.

You can find actual “decisive moments” only in the realm of science fiction. I remember watching a BBC TV serial called “Quatermass and the Pit” in which scientists dig up an alien space craft which has crashed near a Tube station. When they eventually break through the super-hard metal exterior of the craft they discover what appear to be dead, but perfectly preserved (and very frightening) insects, almost as tall as men. Then Dr Quatermass offers a key insight. These space-voyaging insects are actually alive. They’re simply existing in a different dimension, caught between two micro-seconds of time.

Life Continues
You see, we human beings don’t exist in decisive moments. For us, one moment blends imperceptibly into another. Even if we pause mid-air for a micro-second — like the gentlemen (below) who’s checking his recent purchase of some fresh cakes — we’re not really stuck there for eternity. We delight in swimming through the flux of time — and I really think the happiest people are those who “go with the flow” and enjoy it.

I grant you one thing: photography fixes our appearance for eternity, or at least for as long as the image can survive on disk, paper or computer memory. But there’s a huge gap between the reality of the image and the reality of the material world. It’s a gap that doesn’t exist in, say, literature, in which the flow of time is recreated by the act of reading the poem or novel.

If you concentrate on a single, isolated incident in street photography, you can certainly reduce the scene to a single instant. Yet I really prefer to see a contrast between this briefest of moments (the man looking at the bag) and the wider context of the image (people walking past in the background). When you put the single instant into its context you get…the passing moment.

In the photo below, a shopper examines a dress on a shop dummy. The woman is undemonstrative, pausing for a moment or two before moving on. The inanimate dummy, on the other hand, appears to be much more lively, holding up one hand in a gesture that would yield a “decisive moment” if made by a real person.

My photo therefore contains a fake decisive moment, simulated by the dummy, but sufficiently convincing nonetheless to give the image a sense of “rightness.” I’m not sure if I can even call it a “passing moment,” because the mannequin is poised in such an insistent, transitory position, in imitation of real life.

Yet the formula remains the same. There is a point of focus which appears to be pivotal in the flux of time, around which you can see time still flowing naturally.

That’s a passing moment: not particularly decisive, but a key element of street photography.

So many factors work against the best interests of the street photographer! There’s the constantly changing light, the hostile attitude of people who hate to be photographed, and the incessant movement that causes perfect compositions to disintegrate before our eyes before we can press the button.

How delightful it is, therefore, when something works in our favour! One such factor is the tendency of people to dress in similar ways whenever they join a group.

I guess this harks back to our prehistoric past when we all belonged to a particular tribe. Some of us still do. If we join a company that has a corporate uniform, or if we’re in the armed services, or simply working at a job that demands a certain kind of clothing — then we’re behaving tribally once again. It’s all to do with identification, of being part of something greater than ourselves.

Couples
Young couples often dress like each other, not because they don’t have individual taste but because they like to demonstrate what they have in common. Perhaps they go shopping together and express a liking for certain materials, styles and colour combinations.

The two people in my featured photo (above) make a harmonious composition with their shared love of burgundy red. I was fortunate to come across them when they were enjoying a wine tasting at a winter street market — and luckier still to see them sampling red wine rather than white. Spanish burgundy?

Larger Groups
It’s a little more unusual to find larger groups of people wearing similar clothes unless they share the same occupation. I saw these four guys (below) walking away from a street carnival at the end of the day. I have no idea who they are, but for that very reason I find them thoroughly intriguing.

As you may know if you read this blog regularly, I like pictures that compel the onlooker to make up a story to account for the content of the image. Here’s my own version. It may or may not be true.

Four friends, possibly members of a boy band, came to town dressed in their normal clothes (not the ones you see here) and discovered there was a carnival in the afternoon.

It was a bright day, so they all bought sunglasses in matching styles, then one person had the bright idea of buying matching clothes as well. As a result, they popped into clothing retailer H&M where they picked out identical tee-shirts, shorts and socks.

The town is full of party stores, so it was easy to find some colourful, carnival-style garlands. The only problem — apart from non-matching trainers — was having to carry their regular clothes in the H&M shopping bags. Maybe next time they’ll come fully prepared!

Working Parties
If you’re looking for colour repetition among groups of people you could do worse than photograph men and women at work. When people are obliged to wear a uniform they automatically make a harmonious picture. I hasten to add: it’s up to the photographer to make sure there are also other reasons for taking the shot.

The group shot of people at work seems to be most successful when the individuals clearly show their unique personalities, despite wearing identical dress. Such an effect does not come across when you see, for example, a distant shot of soldiers on parade. They all look very much alike. But in civilian life, people are free to express themselves in different ways while still being able to work together effectively.

I have a couple of shots to support this theory. The first (immediately above) shows three guys setting up an outdoor sound system. They all look pretty efficient, dressed in the corporate tee-shirt, with two of them wearing the corporate baseball cap as well.

However, each man has a separate task to perform while communicating with colleagues, including someone else at the end of the telephone, presumably back at base. Individual personalities are apparent, making a contrast with the similarity of dress. The red arrow and stark white of the untouched water bottles suggest a sense of urgency, but the man with his back to us — with the jaunty pigtail — provides a calm, stabilising influence.

I took a similar, but more humourous shot on a later date (below). Again, there are three guys making preparations for an event, putting name-tags on seats. A passing TV cameraman is not part of their “tribe” because he wears a different corporate outfit and works without any reference to the others.

The photo would not be as amusing without the family of pandas in the background. They’re all part of their own tribe: Mum, Dad, and the two Cubs.

Yet like each of the men in the photo, the pandas seem to have individual personalities. The young male has a zany hairstyle and is the only one expressing any concern. Likewise, the man in charge — who points with his finger and seems to be saying “that’s where it goes” — is equally self-conscious about his hair. What appears to be a colourful comb juts out from his back pocket. The young panda looks aghast!