Manchester, 12th June 2024

Nothing I have ever done makes me feel as humble as street photography.

It never gets easy, and not because it’s about skill or technique. It runs much deeper. The finished photographs are a projection of your soul, the manifestation of how you’re feeling on any given day. Were you feeling confident or were you craven? Were you happy or sad, or were you angry and mean-spirited? And then there’s a degree of luck, which isn’t entirely luck but an extension of those previous conditions. How committed did you feel on the day? Did you have the temerity to make your own luck? Did you walk down that ugly back street, past those people you think look interesting but slightly ominous? 

Yet it needn’t be that dramatic. Raising your camera on the street is an act of… well, “bravery” isn’t quite the word because it’s not exactly a war zone. But it is a wilful act of defiance that might spark a reaction in others. If, like most people, you don’t go out of your way to look for an argument (at best) or a fight (at worst), then that’s a very unnatural thing to do. Can you put yourself in that position?

It can be painful and frustrating, yet sometimes exhilarating. Yet rarely does it feel like a relief to put the camera away and you miss it the moment you stop.

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I’ve had to juggle a lot of things in my life to get back into photography, whose absence had been weighing me down. This isn't easy but it felt like something I needed to do. This Spring, I'd found myself looking through all my photo books. Winogrand. Daido. Klein. A few others who are less famous. I even found myself looking at my own two books, which I hadn’t done in a while. 

It's hard to describe why I wanted to get back out there. I still can’t explain it beyond saying it’s for those one-in-a-thousand shots. And they’re not the shots that most people would ever find satisfying. Looking back through all the pictures I’ve taken, it’s something like this which sticks with me as one of my best. Might not speak to another living soul but it speaks to me. Why? I guess it's the incongruity of the patriotism in the face of what the country has given you. That building is now gone, the very worst of the social housing in the area. The fact the picture is technically bad mirrors the building that was technically bad, and lives that are technically bad, and I my own in that.

 

That’s where the art comes in, I guess. I don’t know who said this but the best street photographers would never win photography awards. All the things most celebrated in the photography magazines, websites, Youtube videos, marketing spin for the newest cameras… They have no impact on street photography. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson said that sharpness was “a bourgeois concept” but that’s only the start of it. It’s why I love Winogrand with his tilted compositions, and Daido with his stark black and whites. It’s why William Klein was a master by challenging all of that with pictures that are often grainy, high contrast, off kilter, and out of focus. 

If everything about them is a technical failure, then why are they great photos? 

There, my friend, is the mystery and why it’s properly art. 

And that mystery still excites me. 

I still enjoy writing, where I try to be at my most logical, but, for the moment, I’m very very broken as a cartoonist. I don't know what happened. Blame AI. Blame the market. Blame me. But I just can’t lose the photography bug because it feeds that place where I enjoy the chaos. I thought having a decent camera phone would be enough to satisfy its cravings but it wasn’t. So I’m leaning into my need for photography in my life by incorporating it more into my writing. I covered the launch of the Queen Anne in Liverpool and then the wedding of the Duke of Westminster. I would really like to get to at least one of the party conferences this year but we’ll see. 

All that said, Manchester on Wednesday was probably a mistake. I shouldn’t have gone. Various things went wrong – I’d left things at home, something broke, I had trouble with my phone, other crap not worth dwelling on – before I even started to shoot, the consequences of which spread throughout my day. The result is when I did start to shoot, I was trying to do it too quickly. I’d planned on being methodological, trying out a few different focussing methods. I still haven’t figured out the best aperture and shutter settings. Back button focussing or zone focussing? Maybe a mixture of the two? Certainly not autofocussing which is very unreliable when dealing with real people in a fast-moving environment.

But that’s where I am. Back on the street. Back making myself happy, even if I’m the only person finding value in any of this, but that’s how it always seems to be.