Projects: John Rushton Shoes for Herb Lester Associates

My second non street project came when I was invited by my friend Ben, someone I’d got to know online as a fellow fan of classic American clothes and style, invited me to shoot some images of the legendary John Rushton, the last independent purveyor of classic mens shoes left in London’s West End.

I’ve known John since the late 80s when he was still in the movie business and watched as over the years he came to be the most knowledgeable shoe store owner in the UK. For the last 11 years firmly ensconced just behind Oxford Street, John’s store is a mecca for aficionados of classic mens shoes and unique in its offering.

Ben wanted to write a piece for his company website at Herb Lester Associates about John and the shop and I thought it would be interesting to shoot candid stuff as I would street but for a more structured piece. We were fortunate too in that local face Gordon Millings had popped in for a regular chat. Gordon and his dad Douggie were the tailors to the Beatles, Rolling Stones and pretty much everyone else in those days. (Ben later sent me this link to a British Pathe newsreel clip about the Millings and their pop clientele).

The piece Ben did is here and there are more images from the shoot on flickr

Ben is currently working on a map of 60s London featuring the clothes stores, discos, bars and other key landmarks of pop history in Soho from 1960-66

Projects: Stock Car Racing

There was a brief time around the early 90s when I thought I’d like to move my street photography into fashion. There were a couple of photographers pushing the candid non fashion look at the time* (I was referring to Corrine Day in particular. Bizarrely she died the day after I wrote this. The Guardian Obituary here), kind of like an  update of Bruce Davidson’s stuff for LIFE and Vogue in the early 60s. In those pre-internet days with few contacts and an entirely unionised world of journalism it was tougher than people today can imagine to break into any media and photography was no exception.

Since then all the photography I’ve done has been pure street stuff, but I’ve always enjoyed the classic black & white photo essay and recently the thought of doing some kind of projects returned. One day I was channel surfing and found a BBC TV series about two rival stock car racing families based in the North of England. Immediately I could see some potential as a mini project. I checked and found out that the Briscar F1 series these guys drive came as far south as Northampton so a couple of weeks ago on a rainy Saturday night I dressed down as much as I could to blend in with the fans of stock car racing and headed off to ‘Northampton International Raceway’ (read a field in village off the M1).

I had expected the crowd to be of most interest, but actually it was the pits, the mechanics and cars, and the drivers and their families that were more compelling. After each race the fans descended on the makeshift pits area where mechanics hurriedly repaired cars before the next race.

Below are some of the images shot at night (more here on flickr).

This is Not A Fashion Photograph

Someone recently tweeted me the link to the NY based International Center of Photography. Although not an incredibly easy site to navigate, at least unlike many similar archivev holders’ sites you can access all kinds of interesting and surprising images.

Following the modern trend of getting someone to ‘guest curate’ (read: dig out some funny old images and write some pretentious drivel about ironic post modernism) one of their collections is a retrospective of ‘fashion found in non fashion photographs’.

Actually, unlike many of these retrospective collections, this is an interesting idea. I’ve always been more interested in the styles and fashions of the past found in sources like LIFE magazine or vintage National Geographic than ever in Vogue (or God forbid, The Face).

Anyway, with such a dense archive such revisionism may well be the only way that many of us get to delve deeper into their vast archive and find images by lesser known photographers from the past.

You can find the This is Not a Fashion Photograph collection here

Bruce Gilden Stages His Street Photos (Sometimes).

Well that may well be a tabloid headline for a photography blog but it seems to be true.

One of the things that I’ve found most surprising since the internet has brought so much access to the words behind the work of street photography legends like Winogrand or here Bruce Gilden, is the number of photographs that are staged, and not ‘natural’.

Now, as a street photographer I’ve always used my eye to interpret and give my own spin on events playing out in front of me, but I’ve never asked someone to pose or used a shot of someone who has posed for the camera. I’m not for a minute suggesting that I’m above that and these guys, Cartier Bresson included, are somehow cheating. It’s just that as a young photographer in the 80s and early 90s I would trawl through books and monographs by these guys and simply think “I must work harder at finding characters, at finding interesting juxtapositions of people and objects, etc”.

Watching this very interesting mini doco on Bruce Gilden is enlightening for the simple fact that I’ve heard him elsewhere being interviewed coming off on a tough no compromise ‘the street is the street’ kind of vibe, but many of these images are openly contrived, like the body builder with the old man, or the man holding a blow up aeroplane. Gilden says he saw the man on the beach and asked him to come on to the boardwalk so he could take a portrait.

Again, I don’t want to sound critical, that’s not the point I’m making. I’m just surprised. I never really thought about it until recently. I just thought maybe my world is less strange than these guys. One thing that certainly adds interest to a photograph is the passage of time. Over time all the elements of any photograph take on a new and different meaning, if only because they serve to show a vanished world, or a loved one in younger days. But, with many of these legendary photographers it isn’t just the passage of time (or the difference in geography) that makes their world different; rather that they are in control of their domain.

It’s making me think that maybe I should start using my Rolleiflex in a similar way. As I find interesting people when out shooting with the Leicas, take them aside and ask them to pose for portraits, something the Rolleiflex is unbeatable at.

The interaction with other photographers, even vicariously through video clips like this one, only adds to the mystery of what we do. Right now it’s inspired me to go to Oxford St to continue my ongoing street shooting there.

[Post Script: Here's an image I shot in Oxford St after writing this post. Not staged!]

In A Lonely Place : Japan PhotoBook Preview on YouTube

In A Lonely Place : Japan

I’ve recently been in the process of creating the layouts for one of a projected trilogy of photobooks taken from In A Lonely Place along with some images not published before. I thought I’d create a slide show preview in iMovie and upload it to YouTube as a kind of teaser so here it is.

The photographs were all taken in November 2009 in Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto and Nomazu.

In A Lonely Place : Japan should be published by mid August and will be available direct from this site.

Chris Weeks Street Photography Film

Street Photography: Documenting the Human Condition – Part One of Three from Chris Weeks on Vimeo.

Last year during all the hoohah about the release of the Leica M9, I found this film by LA based street photographer Chris Weeks. One of the things that it’s really hard for younger photographers to get their heads around is that back in the day we didn’t really have examples from photographers on how they work, other than their images and perhaps if you were lucky some brief description of their working habits in a monograph.

These days you can learn so much online (including what not to do!). In his 3 part film Weeks talks a walk around LA with a couple of fellow street photographers and watching him work is inspiring in itself.

One of the first barriers that any aspiring street photographer needs to overcome is the fear of walking right up to someone and pointing a camera in their face. Depending on where you live or are shooting, this can have variable results, angry or submissive. Usually a smile afterwards will suffice, but not always! Weeks is lucky – in LA he’s working in an environment where no one is fazed by anything so it’s almost like being in a human zoo.

We’re never too old to learn new tricks and the thing that I learned from first watching this video last year was how Weeks walked around with the camera in your hand at his side, rather than around his neck. Here the camera remains unnoticed but is ready to raise to the eye in a second.

The difference of working this way is startling. In the past, many’s the time that my intended subject has noticed the camera before I can get the shot. Now that rarely happens and even if I’m walking somewhere a bit dodgy, where I wouldn’t want to be noticed with an expensive camera, holding it by your side on a wrist strap (or just forming one from your neckstrap) is much less risky. If you feel less insecure about walking around with your camera, other people will be less likely to notice or care, too.

Mario Giacomelli: King of Contrast

In early 1993 I was living in the Corso di Porta Romana in Milan and writing a movie script by day with a colleague. But the work was often tedious and repetitive, constant editing (primitive cut and paste on a Mac Classic!) and revision, and there were two distractions I enjoyed most to escape.

The first was street shooting with my little Minox GTE (still dreaming of the Leica M6 I would buy on my return to London with some of the money I made in Milan) and the other was browsing through photography books in the independent bookstores that could still be found in Italy then. Back in London, other than the Photographers’ Gallery (which post their excellent Martin Parr exhibition was beginning to exhibit more and more pretentious ‘art’ photography) there were few places where you could find photography books or monographs. Before the internet books were the only way to discover the work of other photographers.

It was in one of these Milan bookstores that I discovered the iconic Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli. Born in Senigallia on the Adriatic near Ancona, Giacomelli developed his own personal style that it instantly recognisable with its high contrast. Most often the contrast comes from the subjects themselves – the priests in black dancing in the snow and ice, the deep dry furrows of earth in sun scorched fields – rather than artifice.

The books I bought were of course in Italian but were a window into a world of non-American, non-Anglo photographers that one had to travel to discover even 17 years ago. To this day I can’t see priests in the street in Italy without thinking of Giacomelli’s series of graphic photographs.

Ian Bramham, Landscape Photographer

Except when I first started out in photography in the early 1980s and was fearful of taking photos of strangers, I’ve never really had the patience to take architectural or landscape photographs with tripod, filters etc. However, I’ve always admired those who can do it well.

This morning I discovered some images from the North of England by photographer Ian Bramham that made me want to include a mention of him here. Specialising in the wide open tidal beaches of Northwest England, as well and the light and dark of shadow on concrete, stone and titanium cladding, his pictures are well worth a look.

Ian Bramham’s Flickr stream can be found here

Snap Shooter JP: A Modest Stylist

Japan has to be up there as my all time favourite place in the world. There’s something very special about the mix of tradition and modernity, politeness and eccentricity that draws me time and again. I’ll never get tired of visiting our Japanese friends. Last time I went was in the autumn of 2009 and I shot over 2,500 images mostly on the M8.2 but also a couple of rolls on my recently acquired Leica M4.

The view of Japan that the photographer who simply calls himself Snap Shooter JP is a wonderful mix of modern meets cultural tradition, capturing fleeting moments that may be all too passing in Japan today.

The reason I first started taking photos in the 1980s was to record the disappearing parts of London that were left over from the 1930s to 60s, little corners of the past that carefully framed in B&W appeared timeless. Snap Shooter JP seems to have a similar desire to frame little glimpses and actions to record his own changing environment.

View Snap Shooter JP’s Flickr stream here

First Roll of Film Through The New Rolleiflex

It’s been at least 17 years since I worked with medium format 120 roll film. Back then I was using a Mamiya 645, like a kind of junior Hasselblad with a nice rectangular format (6 x 4.5 wouldn’t you know).

When I started processing my own 35mm film again last year I was nervous about the one thing that used to give me trouble – getting the film onto the reel in the changing bag. Many a time I’d got them stuck in the past – half on the reel but not moving any further no matter how hard I tried.

Two things contributed to make that situation worse. Back then I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to use photoflo with the film still on the reels. After a couple of years of doing this, the reels got sticky gunk in them, invisible but enough to make rolling film onto them extremely tricky. Secondly, I was using a nylon changing bag that wasn’t really big enough to perform any kind of task in and worse still, incredibly hot inside once you got going. Like working inside a pair of rubber gloves…

So when it came to putting 120 film through my lovely new (well 1956 actually) Rolleiflex I was a bit apprehensive about issues loading the film onto Paterson reels. I needn’t have worried. Firstly, I watched this excellent little YouTube guide on how to load 120 film into Paterson reels, and used a sacrificial roll to do it in daylight a few times first, but really because my reels are photoflo free and I now use a giant cloth changing bag that has taken all the stress out of my reel and tank loading tasks.

Actually it’s so much easier than loading 35mm as the film is much shorter and has less far to travel around the reel. Processing was a breeze and much to my joy, the resulting negs are near perfect exposures, based only on the built-in Rolleiflex selenium lightmeter and the EV exposure index settings on the 2.8E.

When I get the time I’ll scan them and put them up as examples of a 54 year old camera built by craftstmen with a light meter that by all accounts should have died 20 years ago.

* A quick word on those changing bags. You can pick them up from Roger Luo on eBay UK – unlike almost all other modern changing bags Roger’s are heavy anti static cloth that stays cool inside when you’re working.