On Sunday, I ventured into West London, just as the sun was setting, to document the Christmas shoppers. The area around Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square is always busy, filled with tourists and theatre goers, shoppers and socialites. But, as Christmas approaches, a new fervour descends and hundreds of thousands converge on the trendy boutiques, high street chains and designer stores, all in search of the illusive Christmas present. This leads to a thronging mass of highly stressed, tired and grouchy adults, over-excited children and over-enthusiastic sales people promoting whatever it is they are paid to promote. Wrapped up in coats, hats, scarves and gloves, this mass of people slowly trudges and weaves around each other like a gigantic, disorientated shoal of fish, awkward bags and boxes protruding out here and there, the crowds parting around them like ice floes on the bow of an icebreaker.
As the light faded, the experience became very surreal. The varying light from the shop fronts, adverts and Christmas decorations sent strange colours dancing over faces. Deep shadows obscured everything below the shoulders of the tightly packed crowds, with only the occasional beam of light from a passing bus or taxi penetrating this murk, usually revealing a pram stuffed full of bags, a baby’s head in a novelty Christmas hat poking out among them.
For photography, and particularly street photography, this is an ideal location to capture human life in all its strange, exotic ways. The crowds and darkness offer a protection from keen-eyed pedestrians, meaning you can catch people unaware (and therefore acting ‘naturally’, or as naturally as anyone does when they are performing in public).
It was a beautiful sunset on this particular evening, which cast a lovely sanguine glow over the buildings and the heads of those on the streets, whilst the violent blues, purples, whites and greens which burst out of the hoardings, billboards and shop windows contrasted nicely against this. I had put a 6-point starlight filter on my 35mm lens and opened the aperture to f/2 (partly to compensate for the low light levels but also to empahsise the starlight effect the filter creates). This gave every image a slightly soft glow, creating an ethereal atmosphere opposed to the manic reality of Christmas shopping in central London.
Photography can be a very isolating activity; you are an outsider, an onlooker, watching moments unfold in front of you but never fully engaging with them. You step into someone else’s life for a brief moment, freeze it, and then step out into anonymity again. I’m usually drawn to the more banal things, which are gone just as quickly as they occur. These are moments you are drawn to when you are on the 'outside'. In their very banality, they are almost the essence of human existence; the father and son mock-fighting over a stuffed bear, the family trying to read the bus timetable, the strange facial expressions people pull in reaction to some unheard comment or internal thought. It’s these things which unite us all as people in some way.
I tend to walk quickly, weaving through the crowds, surveying everything and shooting a frame when I spot something vaguely different or which I think may evolve (this could be someone reading a map, pulling a face for no apparent reason, wearing interesting clothing etc), before vanishing into the crowd again. My aim is to be unnoticed, but I’ve found that if I am seen, a look of total indifference seems to diffuse any situation. And given my face’s natural tendency to look inherently bored and emotionless, this is quite easy. If I look so totally disinterested that I couldn’t possibly have been taking a picture then, hopefully, they’ll believe I wasn’t photographing them. Of course, this doesn’t always work, in which case a smile and nod of acknowledgment works. Maybe even a conversation if they engage with me. Interestingly though, most people are so wrapped up in their own worlds that they barely notice anything going on around them (the massive crowds only increases invisibility).
There are occasions where I spot something about to happen, or anticipate the event. In these instances, I usually have to double back on myself, or work out where the best place to stand will be to get the picture (spotting an advert on a bus about to pass someone, or a pair of unrelated events which are about to coincide and be frozen forever in an image, which then gives them an entirely different meaning). Piccadilly Circus was particularly good for this, as it is a major crossroads filled with people all going to different places. Generally, any intersections where people’s paths meet will lead to odd moments of serendipity. The ancient Greeks had a word for this: Kairos.
Street photography isn’t an easy thing to do, and for someone who is naturally shy, it can take a lot of determination to walk up to a person, stick a camera in their face for a reason they will never really know, and then walk off, often without even speaking a word. It requires a sort of faux-confidence, a 'camera persona'. I have to push myself into situations, forcing myself out of my comfort zone and into the personal space of a complete stranger, but, as Robert Capa famously said: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.”
This article was originally published in 2013.
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