I have taken me a while to write my posts this year, I have not been able to think of much to say related to my photography or that which I want to share publicly, so I have been a bit quiet this year. I just realised that it has been 11 months since I last posted a life time for a blog. In the meantime, I have begun teaching photography again, at two different colleges in London. I am teaching a combined course in Illustrator and Photoshop at Morley College in South London and at Working Mens College in …

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 …

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 …

“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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …