A Reluctant Street Photographer.

Subtitle of Things that have changed or are changing (post) pandemic.

As I’ve finished the day job for summer, the doctor and I had a chance to get away via work and have a little holiday too. I believe it’s called a staycation in these pandemic times, in our lovely second city London.

While travelling down it reminded me of when I used to go down to Londinium in the 90’s to take pictures on a Saturday day trip (with Mark a great photographer who went to the same college !)

Back then I used to do a lot of shoot from the hip plus the usual student fare of homeless people, street scenes and what seemed to my eye the bizarre. How I wish I could find those negatives but alas I think they were part of the negs lost to fire many years ago..

Anyway I digress, I do love to visit London, the atmosphere, the culture, the energy, the grittiness, the sanitisation and (some of) the people…I did the usual tourist things while I was down there, went to the galleries Photographers Gallery, The Tate mainly this time, caught a show, did some shopping, had food and wandered the streets. Nope didn’t catch any football as football for me doesn’t start till August...

While there I attempted to make some “street” images. Street photography has always been part of the NathanPhoto folio in varying degrees over the years and I’ve always tried to fit it in when on any trips, be they holidays or work. Not to buck the trend I took my camera and tried to make some images but as it now has to fit round activities rather than be an actual focused activity of taking images, you get a set of mixed results.

When I was working in London it was incredibly stressful, obviously that had a side effect of making street images quite difficult. I believe that you have be at one with the street to make great images. You have to read it for the type of images you want to make. Think street photography for me falls into three categories: Shooting from the hip, the anticipated moment and the accidental moment of genius.

Guess, hope and luck.

I find shooting street up here to be a lot more relaxed as I can always wander that place again, there’s always a bit of pressure to get an image worthy of the folio.  This time around added to that I had a couple of differing factors that came into play when making new images. I’m using new equipment so that meant adaptation of a different approach, this new equipment works in a very different way so it had differing degrees of success in image making. Plus the reflection I’ve been doing with my research work in my new practice has filtered into the NathanPhoto image making process. I now think more about representation, engagement, permission, reasons for the shot and audiencing. Lastly, I think I have a combination of lockdown pandemic anxiety around people. NathanPhoto was always open to confrontation, a combination of news, pap and shooting at night brought that approach on but now that’s waned helped by being indoors for the last year and a half, NP has changed.

The major change this time is in the way I think about making images, I’ve had chance to re-examine my working style and the thought processes behind them and this in turn has altered the work,

So with all this going on I did shoot some work, initial thoughts are that I quite like it (well at the moment) I’ve also came up with a new title to reflect this “The reluctant street photographer” I like this title very much. Think it may be asset of thoughts and a book?

Coming to the end of my word count now and haven’t mentioned half the thoughts I’d had so If you like what you’ve read and would like to hear more let me know and I’ll expand further my thoughts on street photography in another blog, if anyone is interested?

For instance I haven’t mentioned the myriad of articles I’ve seen just recently about what images not to shoot, what styles to use and what approaches work best. The place street photography exists in now we are living in a post pandemic world and what the purpose of street photography image making is? I can talk more about all of that if you like?

Blogs need pictures like gammons need those shiny short sleeves shirts and being as this is called the reluctant street photographer, here’s one that I took quite early on in the trip, it brought on thoughts about something I’d read somewhere, where a influencer/commentator wrote something inflammatory for the clicks bait about things you shouldn’t photograph and one of them was not photographing umbrellas, good job I didn’t listen to that as I’d have missed this little moment, which has a certain quality. Wont win awards but does start off a nice set of images if I can break his other “guidelines” 

Attempting something a bit different withy the selection of images as well as I’ve also included different images for Instagram and Twitter to see how well that works and to show a range of the images shot.

For insta I’ve used a image of a duck pretending to be a pigeon at least that it seemed to be thinking. I noticed him sat on a rail by the Thames, something I’ve not seen ducks do, as it was a London duck I was able to get quite close to it and didn’t disturb at all, if anything the other pigeons wanted to get in on the act and were flying at me !

For twitter I used an image I shot in the Tate of the reaction to Barbara Kruger’s powerful work which was interesting interaction as I put the camera to my eye the subjects looked to move on, it seemed that once it was snapped, it was time to move on, I’m never quite sure about the strength of copyright claims on this so this image may get taken down.

Here they are in full for the blog:

As ever I welcome any thoughts about the image (s) as well as anything I’d written here, get me via email, socials or the site.

Thank you for reading.