The Future of Street Photography
Our assignment here is to push the limits of street photography as it is usually defined… I wanted to evoke the sense of alienation of the modern street. Despite the currently fashionable post-modernist “village-style” architecture of places such as Reston and Shirlington, they remain largely, destinations to which we drive in automobiles. Our office parks, suburbs, and single-zoned landuses create isolation. To walk from your office building to a local eatery for lunch might involve navigating a highway overpass.
Modern streets are not really built for human passage.
Street As I See It
Summer evenings are for dancing in the street
At summer street festivals, people really are on their best behavior! And that’s a joy to photograph. Community, joy, interaction, movement. It’s all there…even though we take time out to do this, rather than it being our everyday street life.
A Sense of Place
This assignment involved exploring the relationship between the people I photograph and the place where they are photographed. In other words, both the people and the place are significant.
Heba of Sudanese origin along Route 7 in northern Virginia
The New Americans
I took a trip down Route 50 West…to find the vibrant, varied new America.
Butcher in a Vietnamese grocery store
Multiple Frames of a Subject
Just when I was giving up on shooting for the day, I serendipitously ran into an animated 11-year old boy, his 15-year old brother, and the brothers friends. They were play fighting and daring each other to do stunts, sparring, pushing, kicking, and shoving but, artfully. Throughout, the 11-year old provided rapid fire commentary on his exploits, how he could scale buildings like spider man, jump over steps, and train to be tough from his manual on Kung Fu (which was partly written in Chinese). He readily provoked sparring with the bigger boys, confident that he wouldn’t be squashed. Below is a shot from my contact sheet of 20 frames (PDF, 1 pp, 2Mb)
Hitching a ride with a fighting friend
Gestures and Expressions
This week’s assignment was to photograph people in public and capture their expressions. I soon realized that adult pedestrians around here have the expressive range of Secret Service-men with darkglasses on. The middle-class world is so predictable, sanitized, and orderly that people can function almost robotically as far as emotions are concerned. There is no (need for) fear, frustration, desperation, or sadness. Occasionally, there is laughter, but that too missing an element of surprise and enchantment.
These boys at the open air festival at Dance Place in northeast DC, therefore, got my attention with their genuine exuberance and unrepressed frolicking as they got their groove on standing next to the real drummers.
Young drummers getting their groove on next to the accompanists at the African Dance Festival.
Constrained but Wiser! 50mm Fixed Lens
So, I’ve been wondering what lens length is best to be able to capture those fleeting moments or instantaneous expressions and emotions that you see all around, and you want to capture in street photography. I learned that it sometimes helps to constrain yourself, to see what it is possible to do with one, fixed lens length. The constraint helped me enormously in developing a shooting vocabulary of sorts. Working repeatedly at 50 mm, I framed with my feet rather than with the lens…
Here’s an offering for the 50 mm fixed lens assignment.
A racer in the Air Force Cycling Classic, May 31, 2009. These cyclists raced 100 km on a tight circuit around four blocks in the heart of urban Arlington.
Channeling Martin Parr
Martin Parr is a British photographer whose work is characterized as documentary, intimate, social critique, anthropological, and satirical. Martin Parr’s Web site requires Flash.
Beauty in men’s eyes can often be a finished product, like a woman’s flawless, perfect skin, or made up face. But in the woman’s experience, beauty can be work, and like a garden, requires ongoing cultivation. Brows, moustaches and other facial hair are like garden weeds on a woman’s face — unwanted, often chemically treated, or physically pulled out.
Here’s my offering done in the style of Martin Parr:
Working Beauty
