Street Photography Research

In the feedback I received to Assignment Two, my tutor recommended I also look at the following street photographers:

• Joel Sternfeld
• Stephen Shore
• Saul Leiter
• William Eggleston
• Helen Levitt.

Joel Sternfeld

Sternfeld's website doesn't appear to work, so I had to look around through google images and so on.  No doubting the artistic qualities of Sternfeld's images, but the people shots looked posed to me, not candid.  To me this makes the photographs more documentary than street.  To understand them, I would therefore need some context about their story, why they were being photographed, connection with their environment.  Not really what I'm looking for in street photography.  

Stephen Shore

To research Shore, I looked at his website.  Now I'm confused, I wouldn't describe this as Street Photography either, although the American Surfaces images could be.  I did like the Israel/West Bank series though, as having read the book Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas, which documents his journey along the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank, and have been wondering what it would be like to repeat the exercise and document the differences in people's lives.

Saul Leiter

I am familiar with Leiter, in fact, Matt Stuart once said that one of my images of Piccadilly Circus looked like one of his :)  (see https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisonadcock/14045898482/), which is nice!

Leiter, who started out as a fashion photographer, was a great pioneer of colour and abstract Street Photography;  he does not seem to have his own site, and sadly he passed away in 2013.  So I turned to lensculture magazine for material to look at.  I like these images; I particularly like Snow (1960) published in The Guardian in his obituary article: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/29/saul-leiter.  I love the colour, condensation, sense of cold, simple palette, sense of fleeting moment; and you can see this influence in Nick Turpin's recent work "Through a Glass Darkly", beautiful but calm and peaceful images.  

William Eggleston

Eggleson's own website doesn't show his images.  I saw a couple of other articles and got the sense that he was a great pioneer of colour photography also (how many pioneers do we need?) but in the end, I turned to Eric Kim's Photography blog for some information.   Like Kim, I looked at the pictures of seemingly banal everyday subjects and wondered what....?  I can see the lessons are important, photograph where you live etc, I tried this with Feltham, my local neighbourhood, both for the Bleeding London project (which I got really tired of) and Assignment One.  I didn't like doing it.  I want to make images that are funny, confusing, perplexing, even surreal, but not banal and everyday.

Helen Levitt

Briefly looking at Google images before I tried to find a specific website, and I saw instantly that her work is more akin to what I can relate to, and bears similarities to that of Vivian Meier.  Also sadly no longer with us, and not having a website of her own, I turned again to lensculture magazine to an article entitled New York Streets 1938 to 1990 showing both her black and white image and super saturated colour shots.  The image of the girl by the green car taken in New York in 1970 I had seen before at the Question of Colour exhibition at Somerset House a couple of years ago.  I like her work and have put Slide Show on my Amazon wishlist!  I think that looking at a collection of Street Photography that has built up over a period of time is very interesting - it shows society, history, culture and change.
Websites:

• 10 Lessons William Eggleston Has Taught Me About Street Photography in Eric Kim Photography available from http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/04/01/10-lessons-william-eggleston-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/ [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Helen Levitt: New York Streets 1938 to 1990s in lensculture magazine available from https://www.lensculture.com/articles/helen-levitt-helen-levitt-new-york-streets-1938-to-1990s [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Nick Turpin: Through a Glass Darkly available from http://nickturpin.com/portfolio/winter-bus/ [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Saul Leiter: 1950-60s color and black-and-white in lensculture magazine available from  https://www.lensculture.com/articles/saul-leiter-saul-leiter-1950-60s-color-and-black-and-white [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Saul Leiter Obituary in The Guardian available from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/29/saul-leiter [accessed 25 January 2015] 
• Stephen Shore available from http://stephenshore.net/index.php [accessed 25 January 2015]

Own work referred to:

• Cartier Bresson: A Question of Colour 11/11/2012 in Alison Adcock Scrapbook blog (as part of TAOP) available from http://jointheaascrapbook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/cartier-bresson-question-of-colour.html [accessed 25 January 2014]

Dana Popa: Not Natasha

As part of my feedback for Assignment Two, my tutor recommended I look at Dana Popa's "Not Natasha" series as an example of getting deeper into one subject.

My first reactions looking through the images were about shock, horror, how appalling that situation is (beyond appalling), but also how sensitive the images are.  Not Natasha is a series about sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and the impact it has on the victim's lives and their families.  More information about the series is available from lens culture.

Looking through the images you see evidence of how young the girls are, how unhappy they are, the damage they are suffering (scars from self-harming), how cheap their lives are, how they have been objectified, abused, tortured, how their families are ripped apart, their lives devastated by the kidnappings, some are even betrayed by their families (one girl was sold by her fiance) and to be frank, it's sickening.  Sickening that human beings can be so depraved and vile to other human beings.  In some images you see the victims, in others you see their environment, and evidence of their existence (traces) or their situations.  And although these images have been sympathetically shot, there is no doubt that Popa is engaged and on some level also feeling their pain, I find them chilling.  It is a horror story equal to that of conflict photography. 

In terms of photographer's engagement - it's clear that she had researched her subject, and spent a lot of time with the girls getting to know them and their story, traveling to do so.  She must have also taken many risks with her own safety to do so.  She spoke with seventeen different women to gain an insight into their lives and in doing so must have had been able to show a protective, sympathetic and supportive approach.  To get people to open up on a subject like this must be very challenging emotionally, for both subject and photographer.  I wonder if Popa needed emotional support herself to be able to produce a body of work that is subjective, but also stands up as a solid documentary.

One thing I noticed, which contradicts the advice I have been given about putting a series together is the format of the photographs.  I have been told repeatedly that a series should be visually consistent, which this is in tone/colour/subject/emotion - but not in format.  She has mixed horizontal/vertical rectangles with squares, some with a white border, some with no border, some with text, some without text.  What does this mean?  It's obviously deliberate.  Is it a commentary on complexity?

How does this relate to my work?  Why was this recommended to me?  The recommendation came as a result of my work for Assignment Two which was street/travel photography in theme.  My approach to street photography is not a documentary/reportage approach like this, but a spontaneous and impulsive exploration of random events looking for twists and irony in every day life.  I like to combine it with the travel element as this gives me a fresh and curious perspective; I notice more when I'm abroad than I do at home.  It's new, different and exciting, and to be honest, I get an adrenaline surge from doing it.  Even planning the trips gives me a rush.

So at the moment, I can only relate to this work coming from a position of both deep sympathy and appreciation of the amazing photographic skill and engagement.  I have thought a lot about where my photography is going over the past couple of years, and I'm happy with the direction it's heading at the moment.  I'm having a lot of fun with it, and for me, right now, that's what I want.  After a 50 hour working week, 15 hours of commuting, squeezing in friends, family and degree work (see Assignment Three for that context!) - all nice problems to have, but I do need to let off steam (not make more steam).  I realise that as this degree progresses, I may need to dig a lot deeper than I am at present, but I don't think I could take on something as committed and engaging as this right now.  BUT as time goes on, I'm sure I will, particularly once I have retired or maybe even once I've found something that I desperately want to document.  I can see myself in the future, once I have more time, making documentaries/reportage articles about animal conservation and protection issues.  That's why I'm dabbling in Wildlife Photography as well! 

I have also been thinking about documenting journeys along barriers, e.g. Israel/West Bank and making comparisons between people's lives.

Websites:

• not Natasha by Dana Popa available from http://www.danapopa.com/gallery.php?ProjectID=218/photos/gallery/not_natasha_for_the_website_32-2.jpg [accessed 25 January 2015]
• not Natasha in lensculture magazine available from https://www.lensculture.com/articles/dana-popa-not-natasha [accessed 25 January 2015]

Practising Street Photography

I recently spent two weeks in Japan (over Christmas and New Year) which gave me a fantastic opportunity to practice my Street Photography - and what an amazing location to do so!  This was the first real opportunity I'd had since returning from my Varanasi trip on a Maciej Dakowicz Street Photography Workshop.  I didn't have an agenda for my Street Photography in Japan (apart from shooting Assignment Three if I could); I just took it as it happened - which is how I like to practice anyway.  And I think that subconsciously I was trying to practice the approaches I had learnt in Varanasi:

Exposing for highlights

Tokyo

Capturing a "moment"

Tokyo

Layering your subjects with no overlaps

Tokyo

Getting close to take portraits

Hiroshima

Finding humour

Tokyo

Putting the subject inside frames

Osaka

Creating a mystery

Hiroshima

Spotting an illusion

Osaka

Using backgrounds

Tokyo

Putting the focus point in the correct place (subject of story)

Jigokudani

Using colours effectively

Tokyo

And two additional approaches:

Echo

Tokyo

Abstract

Tokyo

The overriding observation is that the results of these outings are very similar in style to my photos from Varanasi, however this is not surprising given that this was the first chance I'd had to practice.  And I am really pleased with the results!  But they are of course also quite similar to the style of other people's who have just done their first workshop with Dakowicz.  In March I am going to Myanmar for my second workshop; aside from getting better at these basic styles, my objective for my next trip is to find a more original style plus also to improve my framing (still relying on cropping but don't tell Dakowicz!).

The full set can be found on my flickr site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisonadcock/sets/72157649453566929/

p.s. I also got some nice wildlife from Jigokudani on this trip!