I am attempting to be more careful in the “framing” I put around my subjects. The three people “lookin’ at me” are lined up with with the wires on either side of the road and with the center line of the road itself to draw the viewer deeper into the human heart of the photograph.
I still can’t decide whether I want color or black-and-white to be the dominant mode I work in. My very personal preference, indeed in an almost erotic sense, is for high-contrast monochrome, but that isn’t always the way to do the best work.
I have also made a few attempts to play around with some of the rules of composition, in this case the “rule of threes”.
What I know I want to do is simply make photographs of people going about their days and nights and shaping those images to convey states of emotion, anxiety or simple being-there. The “formal” qualities of images interest me less, but I understand the requirement for some. Much of what I see as “Street Photography” these days strikes me as purely formal exercises utterly lacking in any interest in either people or streets as places where people live part of their lives.
When I have a camera in my hands, I too am drawn to geometries of space and material and light and dark. There seems to be a category of photography labeled “Fine Art Street Photography”. How to situate Winogrand and Cartier-Bresson on an axis like that is a worthwhile question.
Smoke and Mirrors 