This morning, I was telling a photographer friend of a thought, that lead to a revelation in my thinking. On Wednesday this week, I was back in the City making images, walking and thinking as I walked though the streets of the City, which lead me to the thought of why I felt I was struggling to make fresh images or to evolve my images, was in part that I was trying to make images that looked like my preconceived idea of what images should look like. The thing that had seen me approach photographing the City, differently to my past work was that I started the project with the idea that I would photograph what I saw, not what I thought I saw, not what I perceived as being the City, but what I encountered. To let the world itself, inform the images that I make. This line of thought, lead me to todays conversation with my photographer friend, about how young people make things new and I think this is because they are making it from new. Whereas, I have now been a photographer for a while and I have developed ways of working and seeing that informs and creates a style of working that is inherent in my own photography.

I think, it is important to be aware of how you make work, my images are my work. I have decided that I need to get back to first my principles of photography, to get the thing itself in the frame and concentrate on developing my active curiosity, that comes with active seeing. This is something that I felt I have been struggling with for a few months, as I have been distracted by trying to make images that looked like photographs. Images, as I have come to know them by other photographers, this is not then my own photographs, but the influence of others has influenced into my own approach. Now, I feel that I am back to myself and it is liberating. Lets see what I can do with this thought process and the rest of this year. I have till March 2019, on my City project, then it will be done. I will have photographed the lead up to the date that Brexit becomes a reality in the City of London. That is not what I thought I would be doing when I started, but it has become the mood music of our times.

The image below is an example of photographing what is there; I was waiting for someone and the light changed and gave me this opportunity to explore visually, moments before it had been raining really heavily so I was sheltering from it and yet a few moments later the light was wonderful.

Added later, After posted this i was reading the latest Source magazine on Art Photography and came across this on page 76. ” The enemy of photography is the convention. the fixed rules of the how-to-do,” So remarked László Moholy-Nagy in 1947.” It has always been this way we have conventions that get established and they hold us back from working to make new images, and we need to be aware of this.

Developing vision as a photographer.

I know that a photographer and their blog should have its own voice and I am guessing that mine does, that is for you to decide what it is. As I like most creative people have difficultly defining what is my own voice. That is one of the hard things of being a creative individual, you find so many things of interest. Especially if you are dyslexic (and don’t even ask how long that word took to learn how to spell), as I quite often see the big picture and that makes it hard to focus on smaller things. Like specific projects, as they all are important to me. Alas, I am trying to say that it is hard to find a way to express ones self as a photographer. We all struggle with this. When I was teaching, I would mentor my students on the important aspect of finding a style and often I would see the barriers that they would erect to stop them having to make a decision about their direction and style, I think after observing lots of my former students struggle with this, that I would find a way around it, but it is not that easy. We all find ways to procrastinate and dodge the difficult decisions that we need to make, that will ultimately extend our creativity.

For myself, I found that once I realised what it is that I am interested in, it became much easier to make work. I could concentrate on the projects that where really important to me and let go of other things. I also found that it was easier to let the work itself to enable my style to develop.

I have read a lot about creativity and watched quite a few videos on this subject, YouTube is great for this, as there are so many videos is on creativity there, that it can at times become a great rabbit hole to disappear down for extended periods of time especially when one is supposed to be working.

I would recommend that you read:

   On Being a Photography by David Hurn and Bill Jay. Available at: www.lenswork.com

    Ways of Seeing by John Berger Amazon UK Link

and watch:

That is more than enough to keep you lost and entertained for a few hours, Developing style your own style is really important and should be something of a priority for any photographer.

Good luck with it.

Michael Jan 2018

Hi all,

I hope your Christmas was good, New Year is next and with that comes New Year’s resolutions. What are yours? I know what mine will be:

1) I am going to edit my City of London street photography based project to see how far I have got with it.

2) I am going to spend more time marketing this year. As I want to meet more interesting people. A photographer friend of mine once said to me he had problems trying to get appointments because he felt weird contacting people who where to him strangers, my response was that if he met them in the pub and found out what they did, each of them would find the other interesting, as they both had a common worldview. That is why for me marketing is really a search for new friends to work with. People who have a similar worldview are always great to meet.

3) I am looking for a publisher for my City of London project, so that search begins in earnest.

4) Make more interesting images, both on my City of London project and Portraits of people in both finance and creative industries.

5)  I aim to get Google to recognise my website for London street photography and learn how to use keywords to help with SEO. This will help with an idea I have for street  photography walks in London, that I will launch early in the New Year.

I could add more, but these are enough to work and and more only confuses my focus and it is important to remain focused if you want to fulfill your New Years resolutions.

Good luck with yours, whatever they may be.

Michael Dec 2017.

it is Christmas time and I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I am looking forward to a great year of working on photography projects that are inspiring and exciting.

See you all next year, thanks to those who have supported me over the past year, I hope you have a great beginning to the the new year.

“Street Photography to what we recognise today … a documentary form that celebrated the candid public moment” Nick Turpin

As a social documentary photographer you might ask, why do I use street photography techniques, in making my work. Why is it important to my practice as a photographer? Documentary photography is also a technique, which has a rich history and its own set of conventions, just like street photography does. This follows on from my last post about street photography, see here 

“Street Photographers were once men that would take your picture for payment on the sidewalk, that definition changed very quickly when the first roll of 35mm film was put in a Leica camera by Oskar Barnack around 1913. It was really the photographers that took up those small portable cameras over the next 60 years that inadvertently redefined the phrase Street Photography to what we recognise today … a documentary form that celebrated the candid public moment.” Nick Turpin This is as good a description of what street photography is for me. A way of documenting the life that we find on the streets primarily of our cities. Yet for many photographers, once they get beyond the simple act of photographing their family and friends and out in to the wider world the next problem becomes what to photograph. For some, this becomes street photography.

Street photography, for me is an approach to making images that incorporates the social world that we inhabit, it is a way of showing what I see, from my perspective. It is a way of working on the street that enables me to make images where I do not know all four W’s of photojournalism: Who, What, Where and When. Actually I know the last two, and by observation I can sort of deduce the first two but not the specifics. Sometimes the generic person can be made to fill in for the specific. I’m also aiming to make images that are interesting to look at, because I want my viewers attention to be held, I am not interested in what I consider boring images, as they do not keep you interested in the subject, that I want to communicate with you about. In making documentary images it is important to hold the viewers attention, so that the story the photographer is communicating is clearly told. There are a lot of similarities to both conventions. Yet there are also some divergences as well, documentary photographers get to know their subject, take time to get access and permissions. While a street photographer might know the city they photograph, they don’t normally engage with their subjects. The great trick that documentary photographers use is time, they give their subjects enough time to forget they exist and to become background presences, to the action/s that they want to document. They are looking to make candid unposed moments of and with their subjects. Whereas, street photography is mostly about surface, what a place and the people inhabiting it look like. Often, I feel documentary photographers want to disappear and become more like street photographers just observing, making images of what they see, this is the attraction that I find in street photography and why I use it as a technique in my social documentary photography. For me, both are important as I like the idea of access and I like the anonymity of just being a street photographer, this I think if done right can create a story that engages the viewer with greater emotional depth.

In life and with my photography my interest is in money and power or how capitalism functions. As capitalism is the economic air that we breath and it shapes all transactions and power relationships within our society. The more I learn, the more I realise that I don’t know enough about it. However, I want to learn as much as I can about the processes that shape and form our social worlds. Capitalism like all economic systems is socially constructed, as a photographer I grapple with the problem of how to represent a concept, an idea that is a socially constructed. Because one problem in photography is that it is able to show what something looks like, not necessarily a concept, it describes in detail what colour, hue and tone something is, it can show who was there at a event, or a specific time and place. However, it struggles to describe the reason why something is taking place, it can show the results of decisions and this is a problem for me as I am not able to visualise some of the aspect of my inquiry. I can’t show what happened before and after within one frame, that is why the idea of a picture or photo story is important to me. When I am working on the streets of London, I am attempting to make images that reflect the place and the people, who are using this great city.

I do not manipulate my images other than contrast, tone, and density, including the recovery of highlights and shadow detail, all things that would have been possible in a darkroom, for me this is important as I don’t remove or add anything to the frame after I have made the image. That being said, where you choose to stand and when you choose to release the shutter affects what is included within the frame, photographers have used this since the beginning of photography to include or exclude visual information that they do not want, need or find inconvenient to their images/stories.

I find that the approach of street photography is helping me to tell the story of London, as a Global Financial Centre. I look for traces of the financial world on the city, this knowledge is built up by watching, walking and talking to strangers. I have had numerous conversations with complete strangers who tell me sometimes quite amazing stories of their experiences within the city. Some days I feel I am making images that work, others I struggle to get a single image that to me conveys any meaning, that is the challenge of doing street photography in London or any City.

An approach to making work.

Documentary Style, Street Photography.

I think this term ‘Documentary style street photography’ is rather good at describing how I think about my own approach to making images, for my current project on the streets of the City of London as a street photographer.

In writing about Walker Evans, I happened across a piece written by J. David Sapir called Walker Evans and his’ Documentary Style’ a personal reading. I read it with interest as I had studied my MA in Photography and Urban Cultures in the Sociology department of Goldsmiths University, it resonated with me.

The line in particular “If photographs are to provide evidence of the World they must be stripped of their style, denuded of aesthetic value.” That is for me a reason why Walkers Evans is significant as a photographer, but his work still had a style as do all photographers work have a style his is a reflection of his time that he made his images in like all work is in fact reflections of the era that they are made in. I once wrote a piece for one of my classes that explored this notion of each era has a look and this was both a reflection of the politics and the technical tools that where available to the photographer, at that particular time.

Digital has changed photography, but it also can if treated with respect get out of the way and allow plain seeing to happen, however the processing also needs to reflect this idea of simple processing so that the digital aspect of contemporary photography does not call attention to itself.

When I really think about it, using a documentary style in street photography is what most street photographers actually do, if street photographers are concerned with life as it is lived. Yet a lot of documentary photographers, also use street photography as an approach in there work. As they want to show how life is also lived out on the streets and they are also looking for that candid moment.

This idea of a style in photography is important as is about our conventions that we use to create meaning Walker Evans is quoted as saying: “When you say ‘documentary,’ you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder….That’s a real document. You see art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I’m called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.” (Evans W,  1983)” {Available online from: http://documentaryfoto.posthaven.com/a-documentary-style Accessed on 6th Nov 2017}.

So if we think about Documentary Style, Street Photography it is also a style and a process for making images that comes with conventions combining two genres  in the work that is being made. Whereas some documentary photography is set up, and while not made to look like it has been, it does have to have the collaboration of the people being documented to make it work. Whereas, street photography is candid, not set up, that is its attraction for a lot of photographers, because it is about the moment that is observed that is important to them.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was a documentary photographer, famous for working in the 1930’s his images helped to define along with Dorothea Lange what the Depression looked like in America. I originally learnt about Walker Evans as an influence on another of my heroes when I was exploring the work of Robert Frank, I came across an essay by Tod Papageorge called “An Essay on Influence” Which was a wonderful exploration of how a photographer is influenced by another.

The idea that so often gets referred to in regards to Walker Evans’s early work from the 1930’s, is that he was into what could be described as plain seeing (see this article for more), that for many people they do not see what the fuss is about, yet it is quite hard to have plain seeing in photography, even more so with all the possibilities that digital photography can give with post-processing.

Walker Evans is also famous for calling documentary photography a style.

YouTube videos with and about Walker Evans

What I learnt from Walker Evans

Walker Evans, used a large format camera to make his images, taking time to make them, constructing the images to reflect his ideas on and of the situation that he was photographing. He was a Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer under Stryker and would be given shooting scripts to work towards while making images for the FSA, I think the idea of having a script could be helpful as it enables you to plan and think about he images you need to tell the story. It forces you to think more deeply about the images you are making. Not directly by Walker Evans but in theory and discussions on his work the term Vernacular as in Vernacular culture comes up a lot, so I learnt about this aspect of our visual culture and how this affects my own work.

I think the biggest thing I took from Walker Evans work was try not to adorn your with with affectations or styles, as these will invariably date and become out of fashion.

Links to articles on his work.

Walker Evans’ love of the vernacular at SFMOMA’s enormous retrospective. written by Diane Smyth. BJP Website

Amercian Photography by Walker Evans by Ben Cosgrove Time Magazine Lightbox

17 Lessons Walker Evans Has Taught Me About Street Photography by Eric Kim This is a good exploration of ideas that one could take form Walkers Evans approach to life from the perspective of a street photographer.

American SuburbX website featuring interviews and text on Walker Evans and (The Poetry of Plain Seeing)

Books by/on Walker Evans

Walker Evans: American Photographs by Walker Evans (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

This is the one to get by Evans and MOMA. it is one of two that I would consider his seminal works the other is immediately below.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

This is the other book to get, I studied this as part of my MA in Photography and Urban Cultures.

Walker Evans and Company by Peter Galassi (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Walker Evans – American Photographs. Books on Book (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Walker Evans by Clement Cheroux (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Some thoughts on the ethics involved in making Street Photography images.

I originally started to write about my approach to street photography and before I knew it I had started on the topic of Street Photography Ethics. As it is such big and for some contentious topic, I thought it deserved its own post, so todays article is on Ethics and Street Photography. I do not have any definitive answers and this is only my opinion on the subject. I know people/writers with far more clout/knowledge than me who have written on this subject. So here goes:

Up front, my position on Street Photography Ethics, is that I think that it is important to make images of our society, as it is, unvarnished, ie without the consent of subject. My reasons for this are quite simple and it has to do with if we do not make images, people in the future will not know how our time and things looked. For example, we cannot go back in time beyond the beginnings of photography, to see what life was like visually. We have limited ability to visualise what life looked like, painting kind of does, but not really show what life was like prior to the invention of photography. This is in part the nature of how paintings are made. In addition the people who commissioned most paintings controlled the creation of the type of paintings made. (See John Berger’s Ways of Seeing TV documentary available on YouTube), so that invariably when the people commissioning work are the subject matter, we invariably get a propagandistic view of how they wanted to be seen. This leads to the other reason that I think it is not a good idea to ask a person whether you can make an image that includes them, is that it leads to images that tend towards flattery as we photographers want our subjects to like the images that we make. Which, I believe is not always a good idea especially if we are attempting to make images as a critique of the society that we inhabit.

Another of the issues that photography in general faces concerns informed consent, how can the subject give their consent to the image that is made and its use. This applies equally to both street and documentary photography, As a photographer I can ask my subject, ‘can I make your photo’ and yet at the time of making the image, I have no idea how it will be used. ‘Can I make a photo of you?’ is a different question to ‘what will you do with the photo?’ This is the more important question that is often not mention by the photographer, primarily because they do not know where the image/s will appear and how it can be used after their creation. Often when I am on the streets of the City, I get asked what am I doing and I answer that I am making a series of images on the City of London, that I am working on an exhibition and looking towards getting a book published this seems to answer the question. But when I am elsewhere in London I making images I do not have a project, I do not even know if I will ever use the images. Sometimes I make these images for practice, other times because I found something of interest to me so I am making images, in these circumstances I do not have a satisfactory answer to this question. I can say that I might use the images on social media, but hardly anyone ever asks what sort of agenda do you have in making images, this I find interesting.

We also have to remember that all images can be taken out of context and used inappropriately, so it becomes a moral and ethical conundrum that is difficult to solve. I have decided that by myself I am not going to solve it. Yet I still feel compelled to make images, I justify this by it is just what I do, I am a photographer and it is what photographers do, we make images. Mimi Mollica has an interesting take on this, in an interview he did with Ben Smith, for his A Small Voice podcast. Mimi’s take is that we should do it, in part this justification comes also comes from the fact that every day we walk out our doors into a public sphere of the street where we are being watched by CCTV cameras. Here in London, we have more surveillance than anywhere else in the world, so our privacy has been completely eroded anyway and me photographing on the street is actually more visible, because when I am operating the camera, I am in full view of my subjects. If someone does not like my presence they can always turn away from me and the camera, thereby rendering my image a dud. Whereas, turning away from CCTV cameras creates suspicion that you are doing something wrong.

Joel Colberg has an article on his Conscientious website taking a different tack on this subject. I disagree with him on the idea that we have a choice about going into shops if they have CCTV, as it has become pervasive everywhere especially here in the UK. I do think he has a point about street photographers have a responsibility to the public in how they make images and to engage and even educate them in why we are making images. It is not just because we legally can what we do, but it is also because we believe that it is our moral duty to show what our world looks like that we do it. This means that if asked instead of saying I can legally do and nothing you can do about it, so if challenged it becomes an opportunity to have a conversation as to why we make images in and of public spaces with all of the people included in the frame.

Heather Shuker in an article titled “Street photography: rights, ethics and the future” explores the history of street photography and the ethics in a detailed article. I do however have problems with the two photographers she choses to use as case studies as these are examples of photographers whose work is not the normal approach for street photography, one photographer used long lenses and rigged flashes, the other uses a confrontational approach with flash on camera neither are typical approaches to street photography. Two aspects I think she has right are: “all of us have a moral outlook about what is right and what is wrong that guides our behaviour.” On Pg 10 and “Looking at the fundamentals underlying the ethics of street photography, the photographer is typically an artist whose goal is to capture an image that ultimately becomes an artwork and/or a record of social history. Street photographers work to an ethos of the right to the freedom of expression and enquiry to capture the world around them in images.” On Pg 12. I do like Shuker’s idea of taking from the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) code of ethics (see appendix 1 in her article) for photographers as a code of morale conduct. For more see: nppa.org/code-ethics

A recent book Street Photography: Creative vision behind the lens by Valérie Jardin. Their is only three paragraphs devoted to ethics, which I could summarise as, “in my opinion, certain ‘rules’ of ethics that derive from common sense, no matter who you are and where you live.” Is not a discussion of ethics or the idea that if you inadvertently photograph a subject in an embarrassing way, do not to post the image. A lot of contemporary street photography uses visual puns, making use of juxtaposition, this could lead to embarrassment and humour. She also uses a reference to cultural sensitivity of lovers not supposed to be together, but then how do we as strangers know if lovers are supposed to be together. I think this is a lazy example of exploring the ethics of street photography and is common in books on street photography.

Eric Kim is rather well known in street photography circles for his workshops and online presence in the street photography community in an interview for the BBC Religion and Ethics column, he has this to say: “I often think to myself: if I photograph a homeless person or a drug addict, am I doing it to reveal something positive about them? Or am I doing it because I wish to make an interesting and gritty photograph? I think that is a fine line that all street photographers have to be wary of.”

I find that it is hard to answer this one as by not photographing them, we render them invisible and that is also not ethical, as they need a voice in our society. I think it is important to think about why you are making an image and can you make one that adds to the debate, not create an aesthetically gritty image of life. Often when I was teaching, I would have students come in with street photography images of homeless people and I would ask them what where they trying to achieve with these types of images. If you do not have something to bring to the reason why you are photographing them on the streets then I believe that you should not be photographing them. And that I believe goes for everyone, yet recently I have been noticing that on the streets of London there are more homelessness than there used to be, so I am now thinking that I need to include this into my City of London project that I am currently working on, as it is relevant and whoever occupies the City is my subject matter, by not showing the homeless in the City I am rendering them invisible and that has its own morality problems.

Likewise photographing children, I believe we should and yet we have to be careful how we approach this, as I think we should see children in images and how their lives are currently being lived. Helen Levitt one of my favourite photographers, made images of children playing on the streets of New York in the 1940’s, showing how that world looked. We could not make these images now, as life has changed and we no longer live on lives on the streets like the people she photographed.

Eric Kim goes on to say: “I think the best way to approach someone is openly and honestly. This means if you take a photo of someone (without permission) you don’t pretend you didn’t take the shot. You then approach the person and tell them why you took the photo and what you found interesting about them. You then take a potentially negative experience and make it into a positive one.” This approach leads to conversations and that is what I like about using street photography to document the social landscape of our times.

I could go on about this subject for quite a bit as I think it is important, ethics need to be considered and you need to be clear what you think on the subject especially if you are going out into the world to make images. Think about why you are making the images you are, is it for aesthetic reasons only or do you have something else you are interested in, if you do, does this reason override the aesthetic i.e: I like this because it looks good reason. This is why I am interested in using street photography techniques in my social documentary photography as I do have something I am looking at and this informs all of my photography.

Consequently, I personally think it is important that we do make images on the street otherwise we will not have a record of what our time looks like. As I have already stated we only have a vague idea what life looked like before the advent of the camera, especially the small format camera that could be taken anywhere and used at any time of the day or night. I also think it important to engage others as to why we are doing what we do as street photographers otherwise we could in the future find that it is made illegal and that is not something that I want, because I want the future to see what our lives looked like.

Photography can be a democratic art form, anyone with a camera can make images. It is up to us to make sure we are comfortable with the type of images we want to make.

NPPA Code of Ethics.

1. Be accurate and comprehensive in the representation of subjects.
2. Resist being manipulated by staged photo opportunities.
3. Be complete and provide context when photographing or recording subjects. Avoid stereotyping individuals and groups. Recognize and work to avoid presenting one’s own biases in the work.
4. Treat all subjects with respect and dignity. Give special consideration to vulnerable subjects and compassion to victims of crime or tragedy. Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to see.
5. While photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events.
6. Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.
7. Do not pay sources or subjects or reward them materially for information or participation.
8. Do not accept gifts, favours, or compensation from those who might seek to influence coverage.
9. Do not intentionally sabotage the efforts of other journalists.
10. Do not engage in harassing behaviour of colleagues, subordinates or subjects and maintain the highest standards of behaviour in all professional interactions.

Links in this article

Heather Shuker. Street photography: rights, ethics and the future. Available online at: http://www.heathershuker.co.uk/street-photography/ accessed on 24^th Oct 2017

NPPA Code of Ethics. Available online at: https://nppa.org/code-ethics Accessed on 24th Oct 2017

Valérie Jardin. (2017) Street Photography: Creative Vision behind the lens. Focal Press. Available online at: Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1138238937 Accessed on 22th Oct 2017

Ben Smith. Mimi Mollica Interview. Available online at: https://bensmithphoto.com/asmallvoice/mimi-mollica Accessed on 20th Oct 2017

Jörg M. Colberg (3^rd Apr 2013) The Ethics of Street Photography. Available online at: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/the_ethics_of_street_photography/ Accessed on 20th Oct 2017

BBC Religion and Ethics Q&A with Eric Kim: The ethics of street photography. Available online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/0/21532400 Accessed on 24th Oct 2017

John Berger (1972) Ways of Seeing, BBC TV series. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk Accessed on 24th Oct 2017