Many professional photographers do what they call 'personal work'. Basically this means 'I like doing it but no one wants to pay me to do it.' And there's actually nothing wrong with that. Personally if I spent my whole time thinking about 'will this shot sell?' then I'd have embarked on a different career path long ago. So exactly what are these heavily filtered, mostly unflattering images of tourists in Stratford upon Avon all about?
Well it should be obvious by now that I'm not a fan of what passes as 'street photography' on the photographic Internet. I've had it up to here with gratuitously offensive shots of the homeless and shots of people walking past advertising hoardings with the eyes of the models in the posters following them. Shot of course in black and white with a 'lookaleica' and a 35mm lens or it's equivalent. And when some inept hobbyist describes themselves as a 'street photographer' my blood pressure reaches levels that are probably not appropriate for a man my age!! Because let's face it most of it is total garbage. Yes it's photography, yes it's taken on a street, but there any similarity to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Vivian Maier ceases. Plus why on earth people would want to recreate a style of photography from the last millennium who knows.
With that in mind I've been working on my own brand of photography shot on the streets. It's colour, it's heavily saturated colour at that, it's high contrast, heavily filtered and shot with small sensor cameras, (and often smartphones) and uses wide-angle lenses and the maximum amount of depth of field I can get. My recently acquired GoPro, with which many of the above were created, fits right in with this. Plus as well as doing things the complete opposite way to what thrills those hobbyist copycats, I've also started shooting this stuff on video and then pulling stills from the footage. Apart from anything else I like the serendipity aspect of this and as I've written before I'm as cynical about the 'decisive moment' concept as I am about everything else involved in this third rate pastiche of a style of photography that was irrelevant and out of date 50 years ago, let alone now.
So is this over filtered pretentious BS masquerading as art? Well probably. But then it's my over filtered pretentious BS masquerading as art. And I like it and I intend to shoot a lot more. Will anybody buy it? Probably not? Does that matter? No it doesn't. At least it's not some pale imitation of mid 20th. photo journalism.
For anyone who is interested:-
Panasonic GX8 + 14-42mm 'kit' lens with a GoPro Hero4 Black sitting in the hotshoe. All images are stills taken from 4K footage. Cameras were controlled via their respective apps. using an iPod Touch. Stratford-upon-Avon UK. Yesterday afternoon.