When anyone asks me what my most influential photographer is I always say Caravaggio. If photography had been invented in the 14th century he would have undoubtedly been a photographer, his paintings have a low light portraiture sensibility. He picks out the subjects with intense spotlight, his characters are full of movement and often looking like they are mid-sentence, in short they are photographs in paint.
Some might argue that all my photography is low light, I never use a flash and I tend to prefer lower aperture but some of my projects are distinctly set in the dark. In these situations the dark is my accomplice, aiding the viewer in what I want their attention to be and to close in around the subject, sometimes enveloping them warmly, sometimes not.
If there is a reoccuring theme in my photography it is focus and attention, I do this with either a short depth of field or I do it with darkness, sometimes both. There is something about picking someone out of a crowd and making the rest of the scene entirely secondary to composition. In some Street Photography circles this goes against the ‘rules’ of street photography and categorises my work as Street Portraiture, I don’t think it matters whatever you think it should be called, Street Photographers endlessly argue about what Street Photography is.
Technically my London Tube shots are low light, for the first couple of years shooting, my camera was simply unable to capture them, so when I did get a camera capable I cut my teeth with a 50mm f1.8 lens which had to be on the widest aperture to even grab enough light. But it was only when I moved to Edinburgh and my partner at the time took me to an underground NCP Car Park on a Sunday morning that I really started to wrestle with darkness in my photography. It was on the 15th floor below ground and sellers would simply drive into the bays, set up a table in front of the boot of their car and sell their junk. Because of the way Car Parks are designed, with a light above each bay, it was a perfect composition. My little Fuji X100 struggled enormously with the low light despite having an f1.8 lens, over the course of the project I tried various cameras until I got my hands on the revolutionary Sony A6000 which became my work horse for many years after that.
Car Boot also became the first project I completed which had a distinct start, middle and end, resulting in a printed newspaper. Up until this point I had a rolling ‘Street’ project and had read a great deal about the power of concentrating on one particular thing and having this strict structure to focus the attention, but I’d never really tried it before. After Car Boot I always took this approach, not only because of the focus it gives you but also because it gives you respite between projects to think about them, consider the results and look to see where to move to next.
After I returned from New York I was looking for something to shoot and had always thought of going to take pictures of Greyhound racing, then I read online that Wimbledon Dogs, the last dog track in London was closing its doors in a month. I had 4 evenings to scout out, shoot and complete a project for which I knew nothing, but it turned out to be a great way to focus the mind and spend a few evenings outside my comfort zone. In the end I couldn’t get into the final evening because so many people wanted to be there but in the 3 weeks I attended the event I managed to get something I was pretty happy with. I would have preferred to have spent at least 3 months going and then it would have been a much more substantial project but the short time I had made me concentrate on the most important aspects immediately.
Moving on to Oxford Circus, when I had returned to London in November 2016 I had gone and took some shots on the corner of Oxford Circus and Regents St, mostly next to a massive LCD display that was in the Nike store, this gave me enough light to shoot with my Sony f1.8 but it was still very tricky and I never really pursued the project. Fast forward to Christmas 2018 and I had a new f1.4 lens which captured significantly more light. I walked up and down Oxford Street using the light from the shop windows, often big displays which bathed the people in various colours as they went about their Christmas shopping. Because the street was often packed with people you could get right in the middle of the crowd and wait for a gap where you could stand right in front of someone and capture them in mid flow, looking into the shops, walking with friends or just talking on their phone.
The DLR project was one of those where you can’t actually believe no one has done it before, the setup is perfect and the simple fact you can ride at the front of the trains on the Docklands Light Railway as there is no driver means you can see the upcoming stations lit beautifully with the lights of the city twinkling all around. This is probably the fastest project I completed because I only really needed two or three evenings riding the entire network of 5 routes or 45 stations all in both directions to capture the shots. I then went and took video on my phone of the stations that made it into the final selection and it was complete. However it’s been an incredibly satisfying project to complete, it combines just about everything I love about photography, urban ‘street’ scenes of people waiting to travel, it’s a typology and it’s low light. The composition makes itself and the light is stunning. It was also right on my doorstep, I’ve always firmly believed that the images I take may be of someone or something else but they are really about my life, where I am, where I go, who or what I see and this is at the crux of why I take photos, to document my life.