PERAMBULATIONS

The side projects that come from working in the Herbalverse can arrive from diverse and eclectic thinking. Growing up in the Seventies in, on and around, the various Edgelands that surrounded my childhood house, which included; working docks and rivers, ever-expanding housing estates and industrial estates. Shrinking train and tram lines, The drains criss-crossing in between and graveyards everywhere in the older parts. In between all of it a plethora of public houses, coaching inns, hostelries and taverns. All locally renowned for various reasoning and fabled stories. It is in these places that the local history is written.

In later years these off-road short cuts and rat runs, became the on-road cycle paths which are now followed after debriefing from a gig or an event, going through which images to edit stating reasoning and/or output criteria. Helping out, packing down a gig, leads to a lot of nocturnal wandering with a camera bag and usually some empty card space. These are the originating conditions for `The Overnight Express` and `The Shoe Leather Taxi` monikers and titling coming into being however, as usual the project morphs, expands and contracts, changing it in subtle ways. Hopefully this is evolving the project and not making a tangent of the concept altogether.

It has now evolved into cycle paths as this was one of the only ways in which to organise and catalogue the various shoots and images as the project expanded to include all the cycle paths of hull and hopefully leave a trace of what was once common place then updated and transformed beyond recognition. How could I then classify or construct the work into a project. When I could not classify the work produced in my own head. The only commonality was the walkabout theme, and there was no construct to the project. Hull has a splendid cycle network taking you through all the best parts of town, down well-lit safe passageways free from harm and molestation. This allows me to wander around with my camera gear, tripod and such, searching for the photographic menu of the day and this is a big part of the problem. Depending on the weather, the time of day, the surroundings if you are walking along the street and photograph something then something then surely it is a street photograph. Not quite it may have been taken with the wrong camera.

“What, the wrong camera?” you ask.

“Yes,” say the aficionado’s. “You must use the same camera for authenticity.”

“So I have to walk around like Négre and Atget with a bespoke hand-made plate camera and accoutrements to take street photographs? Waiting around for between twenty minutes and eight hours depending on the process? Are you mad? When I can walk around with a little rucksack and a couple of lens and get the same thing?”

“No, you need a Leica rangefinder 35mm camera.”

“That specific one, why?”

“Yes, for authenticity, Street photography is about hunting down the images, just like the masters of the style in the early to mid-twentieth century. Reportage style like in the newspapers. You must have heard of weegee?”

“Oh so you run round like little kids playing 1930`s news reporters, like Clark Kent or Lois Lane?”

Street photography has evolved alongside camera technology. Can you imagine Nadar turning down one of the latest camera and lens combinations and radio controlled flashguns, instead of lugging boatloads of equipment around the catacombs of Paris? I think some folk are a little too nostalgic, either that, or seek relevance, authority or egotism in gaining credit and meaning for their ethics more than their imagery. For others volumes of mediocre snapshots churned out every day with a furious passion, because hitting defining moments is a lottery of position and chance. So I have to be out there doing it every day, which gives them an authentic voice in the practice of chance. Some even complain they need new lenses and cameras to achieve the results expected and cannot understand why their images are not comparable to their Facebook counterparts, even though their tripod legs are in the exact same position. Some see the compositions and are not technical enough to capture the image, whilst others with equipment and technical ability cannot see past the viewfinder for that captured in manual focus human interest image.

The `Defining Moment` is a mantra for the official street photographer who, in a photographic capture encompasses more than an easily understood example containing action or possibilities. What of the static images of no possibilities. Mr Bresson`s puddle jumper to his geometric patterns of architecture. If he is one of the grand fathers of street then both must be included, but there are not many practitioners who will take more than a few variations of standard scenes and push the boundaries of the genre.

This however does not help in cataloguing images and having an order or subject matter for the organisation of photographs taken whilst in the street. Most have no people, some have some people and some have lots of people.

Organisation brings clarity through the parameters of structure and titling. I decided to look again at the old masters for inspiration.  starting with, Eugene Atget and his work with respects to the subject matter and the composition of his images, along with the aesthetics contained within his captures (other examples are: Brassai, Charles Marville, Ilse Bing, Florence Henri, Andre Kertesz, Germaine Krull, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier Bresson, Elliot Erwitt). This gave me the inspiration to look at the geometric shaping within my images, alongside the diverse ways of capturing `the urban landscape’ and one of my fascinations of capturing trivial banal subject matter in anal ways or just seeing how something looks in the photograph and how I would change it next time, until I get the aesthetics required in the imaging of the subject matter. I had many ideas but lacked a central theme or idea to tie them together. Looking at things differently, whilst trying to think of a project idea, I was thinking along the lines of some kind of street work (I have an opportunity to help out and have a solo show in some galleries later in the year (2018), and street is being shown a lot in the local galleries. I thought I could extend the theme of what I shot and could image most of the cycle paths in Hull and put together a series of images showing what most other people are not shooting. I was also remembering Atget creating documents for artists, and some of my commissioned work in the past has been for the same reasoning here

Paul Strand, Brassai are just two examples of, who I unknowingly emulate in a lot of ways, Doisneau and his 1950 The Kiss, capturing moments or scenes, which inspire, is something I find lacking in a lot of today`s photography, many people happy to post any shot they have taken and without understanding why they photograph the what of the image capture scenes blindly and wonder why they are not the same without their rose-tints-glasses on. I find the current trend of shooting through windows extensively uninteresting and uninspiring unpaid for costa adverts. The stand out ones contain the emotion of the scene, while most have captured the photographer`s skittishness or unease pose in the window, because the focus (being on the window, rather than the scene) is on taking the shot unknowingly and their attention is on their positioning rather than the subjects. I am as guilty of this as the rest (sticking out on a small stage in front of a big crowd, with no equipment to hide behind). But when the fashion-ista`s are on the prowl, originality and an alternate view is, sadly found lacking, usually trying the same tripod stands viewpoint.

However, the decisive moment of Bresson is usually a winning shot and being able to see this interplay of geometry and the sensory interplay between people, knowing what they are going to do, or which way they are going next instinctively is an innate gift,

However, without getting into Metaphysics and sensory perception limitations, it is a skill that can be learned, but like semiotics is multidiscipline endeavour in time, positioning, foresight, psychological and psychoanalytical knowledge of human behaviour and pattern recognition of the upcoming inter-actions going on before the photographer (ask an event photographer how to practice this) and picking out the ones that might prove interesting or photogenic.

Modern contemporary street art is interesting and experiments with curiosity are usually always interesting in either finding out how to do something or how not to do something is sometimes better than good imagery obtained without correct intent. Some other modern day exponents of street photography I researched include; Thomas Von Wittich, Mark Rigney, Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Jurgen Grobe, Nils Muller, Alex Fakso, Ruedi One, Boris Niehaus (a.k.a. JUST), Keegan Gibbs, JR (a self-described photograffeur). Jaime Rojo, These photographers are mostly associated with modern underground urban imagery, in various forms and for various outputs. As can be seen from the above practitioners there is a lot more to street than you first realised and hopefully Cycle Paths, The Shoe Leather Taxi and The Overnight Express will find a place amongst the projects and collections of people`s parambulations.