The Other Story in Street Photography - Talking About Your Work
I think a lot about the topic of talking about my own photography work. I have to, of course, since these days I am writing about the experience of being out and shooting street photography.
I am an old hand at photography critique. For years I participated in the Shark Tank group on the Lightstalking website. Its purpose was for members to give useful negative critique on photos posted from all genres of photography. I learned that it can be done and that when it is done properly, growth does occur, both for the photographer and the critic.
Critiquing work is a very different thing than talking about work. In my head, I am constantly critiquing my work. I wish I could say the exercise is always useful, but it is not. I think I knew it was time for a change and a requirement if I was going to go forward with the blog.
I got a chance last week to talk about 12 photos which were not mine. It was my honor to judge the challenge, “The Absence of a Face”, for the Facebook group, Street Photography Challenge. After I made the selections, I commented on each one of them, in part to formalize the choice in my mind. The 12 winners and the comments can be seen on my Facebook page. I used the DIET model developed by street photographer Craig Semetko to talk about the photos. I commented on Design, Information, Emotion and Timing. All photos did not have all elements, as you would expect from this sub-genre of street photography. The picture that was the b&w winner was an example of architectural street photography. There was a human in the picture, but the interest was really the environment and the clever use of light to bring that out. There was no Emotion.
The whole experience of looking at and thinking about faceless photos was on my mind when I went into Nashville on Saturday afternoon. I was in very high spirits. It is getting easier. When I saw the headless, hatless dummy in a window, which has been described as a subtle novelty anchor, I was prepare to stay and take a picture. The dummy pretty much provided all of the Information I wanted, with the irony, personal to me, of a play on not just faceless photography but of decapitation photography. I did want a human presence in the photo as I am a street photographer, but I was not particularly aiming for Emotion.
To have a human in the picture, there were three possibilities. I could get a picture of a person in the store, a shadow of a person passing the store and a reflection of a person passing the store. I did get pictures with a human in the store, but they were not very satisfying. There was limited space, not much was drawing people to the space and the light was not going to highlight them. I turned my attention to shadows. That was a little problematic, too. It was hard to tell that the shadows on the right edge of the photos were shadows of a human. If I got a shadow in the left edge, it was clear it was a human, but then all of the interest of the photo was on the left side, so it was not balanced. I give myself credit for the Timing when I caught 5 people passing at once. The first two shadows, which look clearly human, inform us that the last shadows are, also. The five shadows create an element of repetition, which is a Design plus. The true fortune, though, was that I also got a reflection of the woman wearing a mask in the left hand corner. That provides additional Information that this photo has been recently taken. A viewer will most likely will eventually match up the reflection with its shadow, which is good compositional connection, another Design plus. Finally, exposure and contrast is reasonably good and there are some interesting lines that contribute to the Design.
As the day progressed, I found another theme of the people on Broadway. Some of them want to give us a message.