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. …

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 …

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 …

Sam Abell He thinks about the horizon line and where he is going to place it.The video below on the Cowboy photograph, I would show to my students as an example of a complex photograph and his description of how he made it would often lead to great discussions on how and what a photograph can do. The power of description and the layering of the different elements, would often get student photographers to attempt more complex photographic compositions. This changed how I thought about my own images. Sam Abell was for a long time a National Geographic photographer, which is …

Helen Levitt For me Helen Levitt, is important because of the way she used colour during the 1970’s in New York. I love her way of working and how she photographed children playing on steps in New York, when children still did that sort of thing. This showed what a particular time and place looked like. This for me is one of the strengths of street and documentary photography, to show what a place looks like at a particular time in history. Without this, the future us will not know what things looked like. For example, now we have so …

Tony Ray-Jones For me Tony Ray-Jones with his exploration of the English eccentricities was really influential, he made black and white images mostly. That is what he concentrated on when he came back from America, where he had practiced his street photography with colour. He studied with Alexi Brodovitch and worked the streets of New York with Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand. So he was a connected photographer, who was hard on himself to make himself a better photographer. He used a Leica camera and a wide angle lens, I’m not exactly sure of the focal length, but because of …

On Monday, 13th February. That is this coming Monday, I have having an evening to celebrate leaving teaching. For the past 9 years I have been the Lead Photography Lecturer at Idea Store in Tower Hamlets. I have now returned to my first love and that is being a full time photographer. To celebrate the years of teaching and all of the people that I have helped as a lecturer I am having a little evening at The Fox in Shoreditch, where I am going to raffle off the technical photography books, that I accumulated over the years. I want these books to …

This week, begins the first time in 9 years that I have not had a part-time position teaching photography. I have spent the last nine years teaching, working as the lead photography lecturer at Idea Store Learning, prior to that as course convenor for the NCFE accredited photography at Adult Education College Bexley (which is now called The Learning Centre Bexley) and some sessional work at Goldsmiths College, University of London and at Calat in Croydon. Teaching photography, also helped me research the work of other photographers, and this has greatly helped me in my own development as a photographer. When I started teaching, I had been doing fashion, beauty and …

Michael Wayne Plant discussing Portrait Photography. Michael Wayne Plant on Portrait Photography from Michael Wayne Plant on Vimeo. I have recently been experimenting a lot of video and how to use it for doing interviews. With that in mind I have been making little videos on different aspects of photography as a way of learning about video and film making. The video above, is the first that I am reasonably happy with. I have discovered that it is really hard to just relax in front of a video camera and be natural while filming. I tried to do it with a …