Text from a brief talk on my work as a guest speaker at Maine Photography Workshop, as part of David Castillo’s Street Photography online workshop.

Introduction.

Hi, I am Michael Wayne Plant, I am a Portrait, Social Documentary and Street Photographer based in London. I was born in New Zealand, and I started in my photography career in Brisbane, Australia, as a commercial do anything photographer. I made advertising images for advertising agencies, product catalogs for Australia’s biggest hardware store chain, the occasional wedding and lots of portraits. I then started to create images for model portfolios and I decided that I liked that a lot. I had been buying Italian and French fashion magazines that were always at least 4 months old and in the 1980s they cost $25.00 each, I decided that I very much wanted  to become a fashion photographer, I just did not know how. Once I started to make model portfolio images I then decided that I needed to get myself somewhere that I stood a chance of doing well. I first tried Sydney and then moved to London. At first to assist, then when I did not get assisting gigs, I started to do what at the time was called model tests, which involved working with stylists, hair and makeup artists to build a portfolio. I then moved to Greece, Milan, New York and then Paris as I had discovered that model agencies in these countries paid photographers to make images for models portfolios. Whereas in London, you paid for your own film and processing, so it was very expensive to experiment and build a good portfolio. Eventually, I got to work with good mid level fashion magazines and fashion clients and I got to make some images, that I am really proud of.

Then, I started to feel that I needed to change, as the models where always about the same age and I getting older. So I went to university and studied an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths. This is the only photography MA in a sociology department anywhere in the world, it enabled me to learn more and articulate my practice in a very different way. After gaining my degree, I started to make images using street photography techniques and working along Social Documentary lines. I have always made portraits, these three areas of photography fit nicely together and make up how, I now define my practice. That will, with luck, enable me to remain a photographer for the rest of my life.

I also started to teach photography and ended up teaching for around 9 years at various colleges, including running a photography department in a Central London College, where each year we had about 700-800 photography students on a wide range of courses on anything from short 5 week courses to year long certificate and diploma courses. Covid came along and I never went back to teaching, as my wife’s parents started to need full time care, so we became live in carers. Then about two years ago, I got a part time job at DxO, in their PR team. I now work with a lot of photographers and have gained a lot of experience working with people who do a lot of social media and YouTube. This is helping me as I move more fully into the next phase of what I do as a photographer, which is to concentrate on an area of photography that has always been hard to make money with, which is social documentary and street photography. 

Philosophy of Street Photography.

My philosophy of street photography is informed by my engagement with the world around me, my academic background and the practice of photographers who are both my contemporaries and those who were active since street photography became a thing.

For me, it is taking moments out of time from our contemporary lives and holding them so they can show people in the future this is what life looked like when …. I made this image.

To give you some examples of photographers, Helen Levitt made great images in the 1940’s of kids out on the streets of NYC, visually we do not see this so much anymore. Another example is, Robert Frank while he did not start the cross country exploration of America their where others before him who did this, he made one of the most famous bodies of work that combined personal documentary photography with techniques that we now consider street photography, which became the book ‘The Americans’. Garry Winogrand, is another example of a photographer who struggled with what an image could look like, I know he made some great images along with a lot of rubbish images. Most photographers working in public spaces make a lot of images that do not work, for one reason or another and when/if they get a good image, that keeps them going till the next time, that they get an image which conveys what they what to say about life, as it is lived on the streets in our societies.

I use a lot of documentary conventions in my street photography. In that the only image manipulation I do is I set my whitepoints, black points, adjust white balance, and do a bit of dodge and burning, effectively lighting or darkening areas of the image to render the image more legible. I am not interested in taking out objects from the frame or sin of sins using replacement sky or generative fill tools. Those things have no place in a documentary photographer’s workflow. You as the photographer,is responsible for what you see and now you frame the scene to make your image. If you do not want something in the frame, then don’t include it in the photo, find a different place to stand or wait for the offending thing to move out of your frame, do not take it out later with generative fill. You are the author of your own work and if you destroy your reputation by manipulating your images, then people will look at what your work differently. I for one, will never see Steve Curry’s work the same way again, after I found out that he regularly photoshops things out of his images. As for me, his truth has gone and once that trust is gone, you no longer trust that photographers work. For this reason, I do not do it ever, manipulate a street or documentary image. Fashion images are a different thing, same with portraits, depending also on what it is that you are trying to say. For example, if you are making faltering portraits for someone where they want to look cleaned up and glossy, then go ahead. If however, you are making documentary portraits, then do not ever retouch your images in that way. 

Talk about my work.

I have been a digital photographer since 2004, prior to that I used film cameras and I have used everything from 35mm to 5×4 cameras ranging from Mamiya 645, Pentax 6×7, Pentax 35mm then Nikon 35mm and Contax G2 rangefinder cameras. For about 8 years, I was a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador.

Currently, I use a combination of Nikon (DSLR and Mirrorless) and Leica-M Rangefinder cameras in both digital and film formats. As I also recently went back to working with film for some of my work.

My favourite way of working is to find a subject and work on understanding it. I am endlessly. fascinated by how capitalism has captured our imagination and has rendered almost any other form of structuring our economic life impossible. To the point now where it is almost like the air we breathe, invisible to us. From that, I aim to make images that visualise this and for me this is really hard, as photography is a visual medium and I am thinking about something that has essentially become invisible to us in our daily lives. I am not sure if I succeed, however it is something that I am working on to render visible. Some photographers manage it. I recently picked up a book by Kristy Mackay called ‘The Magic Money Tree’ which is a great example of how a photographer has addressed economic inequality and the social landscape created by contemporary capitalism and the certain elements of the British state. 

With regards to my street photography, I tend to work with Leicas on the street partly because they are small and discrete. I dislike carrying big zoom lens as they make me feel uncomfortable. Also it is more to do with how I use them, I like to look through a viewfinder and to observe the world, sometimes fast and somethings slowly. The ability to zone focus and once you get used to the practice of setting the distance to the subject, by feel with the tabs underneath the lens. Practice make it possible to be faster and more accurate than any autofocus system. This means that I can spend time, concentrating on the thing or action that I am photographing. The standard advice for aspiring street photographers is get good shoes, I also think you should also learn where the good coffee shops are, so you can have a break. Sit down and rest your feet occasionally, so that when you are working you are not thinking my legs/feet are tired, you are solely focused on the moment you are observing and all the other things in your mind disappear, as you make images. One thing that always struck me as good advice, if you are struggling to make images on the street which Martin Parr once said to me, is that ‘you are not taking their image, but you are making your photo’. It is a small change in your mindset, but it is a huge thing for your emotional ability to make images of strangers in public places.

The Tony Ray-Jones Approach to making images.

I really liked the list that I saw in a Tony Ray-Jones exhibition originally at the Media Space, Science Museum, about his thinking on his approach that he needed to remember to consider when making his images. Simon Roberts reproduces part of his diary here where this extract comes from.

It went like this: Approach

• Be more aggressive
• Stay with the sSubject matter (be patient)
• Take simpler pictures
• See if everything in the background relates to the subject matter
• Vary composition & angles
• Be more aware of composition
• Don’t take boring pictures
• Get in closer (use 50mm lens)
• Watch camera shake (shoot 250th or above)
• Don’t shoot to much
• Not all eye level
• No middle distance

I always liked this list, as it said a lot about a good approach to making street photography images. I am not so sure I like the 50mm lens bit. I do get that though as it does get you closer with out physically having to be there in your subjects face. I like using a 28mm lens for its greater depth of field for any given aperture, I prefer to use a 35mm as it is wide enough to get most things in the frame without needing to be to close to the subject. And when you do get close things don’t look weird from wide angle distortion. I have used a 21mm and that is okay but it is wide and you have to be really careful how you frame your subject. When I am using my Nikons my favourite lens is a 40mm as it is similar to our own angle of view so it just feels natural. I have 40mm lens for all of my lens mounts Nikon Z-mount, DSLR F-mount and Leica M-mount. However the Leica M-cameras do not have framelines in their viewfinders for 40mm, so there is a dissonance in using them, as the 40mm brings up the framelines for the 50mm lens, which means I tend not to use this focal length as much as I would like to.

On Making Images.

When I am making street photography images, I walk a lot, I get impatient standing to long in one place, waiting for something to happen, I also think that this is not always a good idea, as sometimes you do need to give a place time, to find the right elements, for them to come together to make an image. I am getting older, so I have slowed down a little. I must admit that sometimes I also get a bit nervous about raising my camera to photograph complete strangers, especially if they are women or children, as I do not want to be that creepy man with a camera. I find that if my camera is already up making an image and someone walks into the area, that I am obviously photographing in, then it is much easier to make another image. I no longer have that hesitancy that comes with raising ones camera to ones eye in the initial moment. Often, I carry my camera as if I am about to use it right then. And it is surprising how often no one ever says anything, or sometimes it can even lead to an unexpected conversation. I am always happy to talk to strangers, as I find I learn new little things about life, as other people perceive it, not just from my own perspective. I love this aspect of social documentary and street photography, the learning about others and the lives that we all lead. Most people, are way too busy to worry about that photographer making images, they just let you get on with it. You can always sense when someone really is not wanting their image made. Especially when you have been working for a while, it just becomes a 6th sense you develop, for me photography is like a invisibility cloak, it lets me be present but also to be engaged with the world, so I can get on with making images. I am not taking anyones photo, I am making my own images, this aspect makes it easier to work on the street. 

Technically speaking

I now often use Auto ISO, and preset my Aperture to give me a depth of field that I want to have in my images. I like to have a lot in relative sharpness. I do not like the images where there is a real shallow depth of field. So I tend to work at F8 maybe F11, I also tend to be moving and as cameras have increased in mega pixels I have found that camera handling techniques need to be better so I now tend to work at a minimum of 1/500th of a sec Shutter speed (or higher) just to freeze subject and my motion.

Camera settings tend to be:

Auto ISO

1/500th pr 1/1000th at

F8 (sometimes F5.6 or F11) depending on overall light quality.

However, this is not the whole story, as a lot of the magic happens in how you interact with others and your own emotional state while making images and then the elusive thing what you see, and feel compelled to photograph. All of this means, that no two photographers will ever really make the same image, even if they are standing in the same place as their motivations will always be different. That is why photography is so hard to do well.

Right now, I am starting to work on a new body of work that involves making street photography images on the streets around Mayfair. For the first time is a long time I am going to work with Black and White to make one part of the project as a way to create a distinction between two halves of a project. As I have not worked in Black and White seriously, since I went to digital cameras, it is exciting to shake things up a little bit.