Do you only do street photography?
No I don’t only do street photography, but mostly.
Aside from family portraits, which I keep private, I photograph about 90% candid street portraits and 10% architecture.
As you can see on my other tumblr (thiscitycalledearth.tumblr.com) I am fascinated by all urban photography, not just street portraits, But I only rarely do anything else myself.
I have photographed some cityscapes and architecture in Miami and Denver. And I have photographed some of the buildings in my home city (Birmingham, England). I like to think that my architecture shots are pretty good, but I don’t (currently) share them online.
I have a steady hand, so even without a tripod the first hurdle of good architecture photography is simply jumped. And if you know the #1 rule of composition - the rule of thirds - it’s not complicated to take decent photos of buildings. You either get good shots because you’ve strictly abided by the rule, or you get them because you’ve consciously strayed from the rule. If you’re working in colour, usually adding some saturation, either on your camera or computer helps too.
So why do I not do more architecture photography? There are two main hurdles that get in my way.
The first is that to me photography is a means of self-education. I take photographs of things that I want to know more about. As a sociologist (by background, not currently by profession), I want to know about people and their environment and the relationship between people and city. If I sit for a couple of hours people-watching in the centre of my city, without a camera, I see thousands of people for a few seconds. Not long enough to learn anything about each individual, their relationship with everyone around them or their relationship with me.
But, if I sit for a couple of hours people-watching in the centre of my city, with a camera, I will see the same thousands of people for a few seconds. But I also get to see a photograph of 100, 200 or even 300 of them again and again, whenever I want to. By repeatedly viewing the candid portraits I take and by viewing them in the context of the thousands of others I have taken, I begin to learn something about my subjects. Of course, I cannot learn anything for certain about them from one photograph, but over time, the various reactions people have to me and my camera has become something I can read. Anyone who looks directly into my camera has a different relationship to me than if they’d been looking at me without my camera. From them, I learn the most. Pointing a camera at someone teaches you something about them, it brings you a little closer to them, it’s a minor form of intimacy (of course, it’s not a reciprocal relationship, and this ethical aspect of candid portraiture is something I’ll post about here in the future).
The large series of candid portraits I now have (approximately 6,000 taken, approximately 1,500 that I consider worth keeping) has taught me plenty about the people of my city, their diversity and commonality, their class system and their subcultures, their work and their play. All these will be topics for future blogs.
By contrast, although I want to learn about the architecture and what you could call the “hardware” of my city (as I do of any city, the world as becoming-a-single-city), it is so familiar to me that I learn nothing from photographing it. I know the physical space of my adopted city very well.
Photographing a skyline or buildings I’ve seen hundreds or thousands of times before teaches me nothing. No gain in intimacy is to be had because we’re friends already. This is the first and major barrier that prevents me from spending any time attempting to produce the kind of cityscape and architecture photography that I spend a lot of time looking at online.
(The same applies in reverse. I believe I do get a little closer to, a little more familiar with, the cities I yearn to visit (the “global cities”) by viewing cityscape and architecture shots of them online).
The second barrier to me regularly shooting the type of cityscape or architecture photographs that I love is that I need to more regularly be in a location that can provide interesting skylines and buildings! There is little opportunity on either macro- or micro scale for impressive photography of the hardware of my own city. Aside from a few high-profile recent builds (the Bull Ring, the new hospital, the second Mailbox development, maybe) there’s not a lot of physical inspiration in my city. And so my photography is all about its people, who are constantly inspiring me. Until I’m able to travel I will not be engaging in a serious way with anything other than street portraiture.
