Exposing Neoliberalism on www.CreativeLondoners.com

I have just had an interview on my City of London social documentary/street photography project published on Creative Londoners, it is a new website writing articles/interviews about you guessed it, ‘Creative Londoners’. Oli Gudgeon started the website to write about this subject. He has already done a few interviews and I was really honoured to be asked, so without saying to much other than go check it out, and please return here to leave a comment when you have read it, as I would love to hear what you think. I got to talk about my approach to Street Photography and Social Documentary Photography.

Exposing Neoliberalism on www.CreativeLondoners.com

Michael

Panelist on Photographing the City at Street London

In August this year, I was honoured to be asked by Nick Turpin of the street photography collective iN-PUBLiC to be included on a panel discussion on photographing the City of London. The panel was part of the Street Photography Symposium held at the wonderful new D&AD building in Shoreditch just off Brick Lane. The weekend was a great event put together by Martin Usborne of Hoxton Mini Press and Jason Reed the founder was back in time for the event. Both Jason Reed and Nick Turpin where the creative directors for the Street Photography Symposium  I have to say they put on an extremely well organised event that gave lots to think about for a street photographer. My section involved a panel discussion with Nick Turpin, Stephen McLaren ( of Street Photography Now {AmazonUK Link} fame) and Charlie Kwai and I even got a panelist mention page on the website check it out  (Michael Wayne Plant panelist page). the discussion could have gone on longer as we had only just scorched the surface when we where given the 5 minute warning for our time slot.

I do hope they invite me back next year, as it was such a great well run event. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Street Photography. The range of speakers and photographers presenting work was diverse. I think credit should go to Nick Turpin for a lot of that, in addition he also made a real effort to include women photographers in the conversation on street photography.

The Facebook page is: @streetlondon2017

and the Twitter account is: @StreetLondonPS

Mikhail Bralowski, made a great image of me as I approached him on the Sunday morning.

In January 2016, I started a social documentary project to photograph the City of London. This projects is ongoing and evolving over time. When I started I thought it would take me about a year to make a set of images and I would move onto something else. Part way into the project England voted for Brexit and I realised that I needed to keep going with this project. It has become apparent to me that the project has developed a life of its own and I will stop it the day that Brexit happens or Brexit is cancelled one or the other. In making the images for this project I have really developed my street photography techniques  and am finding that as I work on this project my skills have improved. I am able to anticipate thinks more and make more complex images, juggling multiple elements in my images. As I have worked on this project my ambitions for it has grown.

It is fun being a Street photographer in London, as there is alway something to observe and photograph. The City, is changing before us yet most of us don’t realise just how much the City of London has already changed, even in the time since I started on this project. I had the realisation the other day, as I was walking near the Lloyd’s building, that London is getting a downtown area, one of skyscrapers. Some of these new massive buildings block the light and create mini weather systems. Some streets, have become wind tunnels and others, have these wonderful warm patches caused by air vents, that could make winter days on the street quite pleasant. I find often that their are patches where light is being reflected off a building onto the street, these vary by times of day, duration and intensity. The process of documenting a City like London has taught me a lot about how people use the City and my own practice as a street photographer, London is a vibrant city and this reflects in the density and diversity of people at various times of the day. I find that there are three busy times of the day in the City that are productive for street photography, these are the evening and morning rush hours and at lunchtime as the density and likely hood of something interesting happening increases.

To see more go to my City of London Gallery here

What do social documentary photographers do? Or more importantly what do photographs do? If we accept that social documentary photographers are storytellers, then the photographs that we make are our stories and to make great photographs, we need to connect ambitions for our photographs with what we want to say as storytellers.

It is really that simple. Yet we have a problem with photographs as there meaning is not always fixed, it is often dependent on context and the words that we use around the image. That is why newspapers don’t let images speak for themselves, as they are often using images to illustrate a particular thing and they do not want the image to contradict the article they are using it with.

We as photographers struggle with this, when we start editing our projects. As we struggle with what we want to be saying. As an example: I am starting to edit my City of London Project, because I have something coming up that I need to make a 20 image selection for. So I am starting the process of editing the images that I have been working on for the last 18 months. It will enable me to see the gaps and to set about filling these in before I finish with this project. But first, I need to be very clear about what my intentions for the work are currently. I started out with one idea, that of photographing the City of London with no fixed idea of where it could take me, Yet I wanted to see traces of the finance industry on and in the City of London.

However, as time has gone by, I have found myself returning to the same places and working in a similar area of the City looking to see how my story develops. I fight this tendency by walking other areas of the City and this sometimes works. So editing of the project will help me in seeing what it is that the images I have made so far are saying to me.

I am currently rereading a book called “Creative Authenticity” Ian Roberts, his principal 2 deals with communication. “Art is fundamentally communication. We feel something and we want to give expression to. (page 40)” This is the motivation for a lot of social documentary photography, we want to communicate something using an artistic process. I particularly like “power comes from something deeply felt and simply stated. (page 41)” As an aesthetic idea it is worth exploring when constructing stories, in other words the strength of our communication will improve when we feel something deeply and find a way of communicating it clearly, to our audience. And his principal 5 where he says, “if we are diligent in learning our craft, our voice-what is uniquely ours-will come out in the telling.” …  “If we’re serious about giving expression to our voice, we need to master whatever skills are necessary, whether it is the ability to draw (in our case photograph) or a better sense of composition. Until we deal with them, these problems will continue to stare us in the face graphically, boldly, and every painting (image) we make. (page 65)” ( I have modified the above quote slightly to incorporate photography).

So what were looking for is a way of creating our stories, for an audience more than ourselves, one that communicates, moves and motivates our audience to engage with our subject. This involves developing our craft, and our stories that we want to tell, to enable us to communicate as clearly as possible what it is that moves us to make the images and stories that we choose to make.

Bibliography

Roberts, Ian. (2004) Creative Authenticity: 16 principles to clarify and deepen your artistic vision.  Fairfield: Atelier Saint-Luc Press.

Recently, My wife and I visited Portugal for the first time and I really loved it. We travelled around the country, first arriving in Farovisiting Olhåo, Fuseta and Albufeira in the Algarve before driving up country to Coimbra and then Porto. We then drove down the coast to Aveiro and onto Lisbon, while in Lisbon we went to Cascais and around the coast to Sintra. Travelling from Lisbon we went down the Atlantic coast to a wonderful little beach side place called Vila Nova De Milfontes, then down towards Lagos and back to Olháo before flying back to London via Faro. It total we drove approx 1800 kilometres, seeing a lot of Portugal.

I  

Things I learnt, the Portuguese drive badly, they are really friendly, the weather was not as warm in April – May as I thought it would be but a few weeks later and they had bah fires that killed a lot of people quite near to were we drove around Coimbra. The country has a lot of poorer than I expected especially compared to Spain next door. The Architecture was not as grand on a lot of buildings and this is a reflection of the countries wealth. When they get to modern architecture I saw some I really liked. In all I really like Portugal and we will go back to Porto one day.

Click on any of the small images to load a gallery and see the images I made in Portugal larger.

Alex Webb

Alex Webb has become influential not just to me, but a whole lot of street photographers, partly because he is rather good and partly because his work is hard to do well. He likes to have everything in focus from close to back within the image, this is achieved by having a large depth of field in his images. He also works extensively with a 35mm lens because this is how he sees the world. It does not distort reality, but is a little wider than our angle of view. Oh I forgot to mention he is yet another Leica documentary photographer, who is also a Magnum photographer. Those Magnum guys and girls get everywhere, it helps as the agency helps them to raise their profile and be more widely seen, by everyone in the photographic community.

Alex Webb also works a lot with his partner Rebecca Norris Webb on projects, as you will see in some of the books featured at the bottom in the book listings. He is generous with his ideas about how he works and try as you might, you will still not make images like him, which shows his confidence as a photographer in his own approach to making work.

YouTube videos with and about Alex Webb.

8 Part series on Alex Webb and working in Korea.

This last video is rather long featuring Alex Webb talking about his work in the book “The Suffering of Light“.

What I learnt from Alex Webb.

See if you can put two things together to create layers of meaning within an image, don’t be afraid to push elements of the image to the edge of the frame and introduce complexity into the image. Be adventurous with you image making, take risks. Try to work out what emotion a place evokes for you and if you can articulate it then also see if you can visualise this within the image.

Work on photographic projects, as they will give your work focus.

Links to articles on his work.

Two Looks Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb’s blog is at: webbnorriswebb.wordpress.com

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb’s Website:  www.webbnorriswebb.co

Alex Webb’s Photograph page at the Magnum photography agency

New York Times lens blog on: Alex Webb: Rendering a Complex World, in Color and Black-and-White By James Estrin

Alex Webb: More is more By Geoff Dyer on the Guardian Newspaper website.

Eric Kim on 10 Things that Alex Webb can teach you about street photography.

Books by/on Alex Webb

The Suffering of Light by Alex Webb (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link) Get this one for an great overview of Alex Webb’s work it is a must have in any street photographer’s book collection.

Istanbul City of a Hundred Names by Alex Webb (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link) Get this book for a deeper insight into how these two photographers work.

La Calle Photographs from Mexico by Alex Webb. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Slant Rhymes by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Memory City: The fading days of Film by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Crossings Photographs Form US Mexico Border by Alex Webb. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Under a Grudging Sun by Alex Webb. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Amazon From the Floodplains to the Clouds by Alex Webb. (Amazon US link), (Amazon UK link)

Their are a couple more of Alex and Rebecca books but I think this is enough to go on with for now.