I’m standing in a packed tube train, I’ve just been lent a Nikon D7000, a significant upgrade to my D60 which just couldn’t handle the low light of the tube. Over my shoulder I notice a woman with striking blue eyes, bleach blonde hair and Beats headphones on. I raise the camera, rest it on my shoulder with my other arm holding the overhead rail and take a shot of her, it takes at least half a second to focus and capture the shot but she never looks away, this moment changes my photography forever.
Over the next two years that photo, amongst many others, were exhibited in the Horniman Museum, London Independent Photographers Members show, Photofusion’s Annual Members shows (2012 & 2013), online on the Guardian’s Camera Club and eventually, a finalist in the 2016 Lensculture Street Photography Awards. To say that photograph was pivotal is an understatement, it changed my approach to photography, it changed the relationship with my camera (I bought the Nikon D7000!) and it gave me an artform I had been seeking all my adult life.
I’ve been a creative professional all my life, mainly in Web & Print Design but the biggest downside to working for clients are the clients themselves. A few are wonderful, give you the room to express the brief exactly how you feel it should be interpreted, but as design is a subjective artform, the people paying the invoice want input and when I was an angry young man, this was a massive issue. I had learnt film photography at college and university, it forms an important part of the creative process when you are a design student, but I never really took it further as a way to express myself. The process is time consuming and the printing process takes a lot of practice to master. It was a means to an end and I never really pursued it that seriously.
When digital cameras came along I dipped my toe in (first digicam was a Kodak DC 200, 3 Megapixel!) but it was only when the DLSR’s started coming down in price and I had the income to buy one that I started to get more interested. I had a Nikon D50 and I used it and loved it for over a year until I left it on an EasyJet flight to France and never saw it again. The period without a camera made me realise I wanted to explore this more so I borrowed a D60 from my friend Dave and also took his course on manual photography. At the end I asked him to give me a project and he said ‘Research Henri Cartier-Bresson and go and take some street photography’ and almost instantly I was hooked.
Initially I would take pictures of Borough Market as it was on my commute to work and on various days in the morning and evening you could see all sorts of different activity, from other commuters in the rain to market sellers setting up and breaking down their stalls, to the market porters shifting all sorts of equipment around. As you do when you start researching and becoming obsessed with Street Photography, I processed all my pictures in black and white. It was seen as the classic way to view and display street at the time, a hangover from the film days of the 50’s through to the 80’s of famous candid photographers. This all changed when I had a portfolio review with Gina Glover from Photofusion, she looked at all my B&W street but when she came to some colour photography I had done whilst in San Francisco she exclaimed ‘You’re a colour photographer’. I reprocessed my Borough shots in colour and I’ve never looked back.
It was two years shooting street before the day of the Tube photo, and from that moment on Street photography changed for me, I no longer wanted ‘street scenes’, I wanted to get closer, so embarked on a project which I called ‘Getting Closer’, this is what propelled me into being exhibited and featured in photography magazines. It wasn’t without criticism, because I initially focussed on taking pictures of women I was called ‘no better than someone who wolf whistles at women in the street’ which knocked my confidence and resulted in me not shooting for nearly a year. It was only when I saw Gina from Photofusion again who said ‘it’s what you do, so do it’ that I resumed, abiet with an updated and nuanced approach.
In retrospect, these early years were all to do with my self confidence, my relationships with women and my general lack of direction in life. Susan Sontag writes extensively in her essays ‘On Photography’ about how the camera is a shield and I would find myself adopting the ‘official photographer’ at work and social Street events just so I didn’t have to speak to anyone. I was hiding behind the camera whenever I could, I wanted my photos to speak for me and unbeknownst to me, they were speaking volumes.
Even now I much prefer to be the faceless stranger who appears before you, raises the camera to my face, takes your picture and disappears into the night and this, on numerous occasions, has raised eyebrows with people who look at my photography and almost always say ‘did you speak to them?’, when I say no they usually talk about privacy or permission and say they wouldn’t be happy if I did that to them, while they continue to leaf through the pictures and indulge in their voyeurism of strangers.
When I took these pictures back in 2012 social media was in its infancy, smart phones were relatively new and a photograph would live on a website like Flickr, hidden from 99% of the world. In the subsequent years my approach to candid street photography has softened. I no longer get in people’s faces, I choose my subjects carefully and I am aware of the reach a photograph can have. A lot of these pictures are taken on the Tube, in stations where people are in transit. In London this is obviously a big part of life and when I used to commute everyday it was a big part of mine. Things have changed, I no longer commute every day and so these types of pictures are unavailable to me. But I also used to consistently carry my camera, switched on and in my hand whenever I left the house, which I no longer do. This is because my approach to projects has changed. In those first formative years my photography was one long project that never ended. I would shoot every day on the way to work and on the way back, processing my images in the evening and posting at least one shot on my Flickr account and saving other good shots for posts on days I didn’t capture anything good.
When I moved to Edinburgh and started the Car Boot Sale project (which you’ll see in the Low Light gallery) I moved to a much more structured way of working, identifying what I wanted to capture, spending weeks or months capturing it and then collating it into a coherent project. A start, middle and end. Ever since the Pandemic I have stopped posting daily shots, the work in progress of the project, in favour of starting and finishing the entirety of the project before showing it to anyone. The reason for this is two fold, firstly removing myself from the daily commitment of social media is good for my mental health and secondly I’m only showing the world my best work. It also allows me to consider the project’s direction right up until the end when I edit it, which I think gives much more creative freedom and removes any bias I get from ‘likes’ and ‘engagement’.
I don’t know if I’ll ever take pictures like this again, it takes a lot of courage to get so close, to basically force yourself into someone else’s day and be willing to take the flack that occasionally happens when you do (even if it was a lot less often than you would imagine). They represent a time in my life where I was learning who I was, I was having therapy, understanding my mind, making peace with my past and looking forward to the future. It’s only now 15 years later I can actually look at these pictures and see them for what they are, every one of these subjects are people I wanted to be, or know or be like, I wanted to have the confidence to present my real self to the world and not be wracked by doubt, crippled by shyness and masking that with a bravado that I now see as highly unappealing. Photography has played a big part in my mental health journey and I expect that’s not dissimilar to a lot of photographers and artists in general. Expression of an art form, when done right, is an expression of our true selves and these photos represent to me as a very clear case of this.