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 …

“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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I have been working towards a way of working that is part documentary and part street photography for a while now and I have come to the conclusion that Photography is Easy, Meaning is Difficult. I have an idea for what I want to say with my photographs and the making of images is easy especially with current digital cameras, but the making of meaning is much harder. By that I am referring to the kind of meaning that I want to have in my images, not the meaning that is attributed to the image because of their interpretation of …

Michael Wayne Plant Featured in Inspired Eye Photography Magazine. You can see the article via the link:www.theinspiredeye.net/inspired-eye-issue-39 That is not me in the first image by the way. The interview is rather long I got a bit carried away with answering the questions, I must have been feeling rather talkative. It is not free, but I think worth the the $4-95 for a single issue, or $19-95 for 6 issues. Check it out and let me know what you think of the interview, I would love to hear your opinions. I am discussing my approach to photography, street photography, equipment …