April 2018. 7 years ago, John Harper and I decided to each write a Blog on the same subject. Form versus Content. You can read the post here. John is a photographer I really like. As well as being a very good photographer, he’s also someone who could be described as erudite when it comes to Street Photography. Even if, as he says, his blogs sometimes go off in all directions, there’s always something in them that’s directly or indirectly related to Street Photography that gives food for thought. For me, his prose is at least as good as his photos (he’ll tell you that his work is crap… Don’t believe him!). He’s also one of the few photographers I was able to meet in person when I spent ten days or so in Bristol (UK), not far from the city where he usually works: Bath. We’d talked about the idea of writing again, not really four hands, but each working on a common subject.

Before going any further, as usual, this Blog is about Street Photography. I only talk about what I know. I wouldn’t dream of talking about photography in general. All my thoughts are based on the premise of Street. And of course my word is not gospel. It should be taken for what it is. Just my point of view on the matter. You can disagree and that’s fine.

In my previous articles, I said that I didn’t have any particular talent for street photography. From my point of view, all you have to do is observe what’s going on in the street and capture what’s happening in front of you. I looked a lot at other people’s photos. Whether it’s amateur photos like yours and mine, but also by reading the Masters books that I’ve bought. At home, I have Winogrand, Parr, Webb, Depardon, Meyerowitz, Klein, Moriyama… You see, there’s plenty to educate your eye by trying to deconstruct the photos of these Masters to understand what makes them so interesting.

For me, there are a whole host of elements that make a photo a success. By studying the photos, you can see why they appeal to you. I’m going to try and list some of the things that are essential to me in the street. That’s what attracts my attention. This doesn’t guarantee a successful photo, but these are elements that can contribute, or at least they’re a starting point.

Photography: writing with light in ancient Greek. That says it all. Yes, light is very important in photography. There are all kinds of light, and no one is better than another. You can have preferences, but all types of light have their advantages. Obviously, if you’re going to do light/shadows, you’ll need a fairly harsh light that will allow you to play with the differences in contrast. Light also creates atmosphere. Whether the light source is in front of you or behind your back. These things are important, and depending on the mood you want to create, you’ll need to move around in relation to the light source. For some photos, light can play an important role. You can have fun playing with it by juggling with silhouettes and shadows. What I prefer, though, is rather flat light. In other words, overcast days with clouds that give us a more diffused, softer light. The reason why I prefer this kind of light is because there are fewer shadows and it allows me to emphasise the composition and not take the easy way out and only consider strong contrasts.

Composition is an important element in good photography. The rules I set myself are fairly simple. I always try to get an image that is clear and readable. A photo that is balanced. That’s quite a complicated thing to achieve in the street and I don’t always succeed. You have to make sure that the people photographed don’t overlap with elements that make the photo difficult to read. For example, two people on top of each other, making it difficult to read. Very often I tend to want to stack as many things as possible in a photo. But in the end, I realised that the most important thing was not to add things, but to substract them. An overloaded photo will be a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Chinese restaurant… it’s an orgy but it’s really not very good. The street can be very messy and our role in the composition is to reorganise this chaos to produce something that is readable. When I’m on the street, I can manage up to 2 or 3 elements at the most in a composition. If there are more in my photos, it’s pure chance. I haven’t mastered the rest of the elements and I’ve let them take on a life of their own in the composition. But 2 elements are a good starting point.

Gestures are what attract me in the first place. As soon as I see one, a little siren goes off in my head. WARNING! This same gesture can be fleeting and, if I’m not far away, it can be enough to set off the alarm. If I’m further away, I quickly move closer, hoping that this gesture will be prolonged or repeated. Why gestures? We often shoot at 1/500s or even faster in the street. So our photos are a snapshot, a captured moment. It’s not like video where the image represents life. In a photo, everything is static. We’ve encapsulated a moment in an image and the gestures give life to the photo. It’s a way of giving movement. Oh sure, there are other ways of giving an impression of movement in an image, but gesture is what I prefer.

There are also interactions between people in the street. Humans are social animals and therefore interact very often with their fellow creatures. I’m always on the lookout for these moments because there’s always something that can come out of them. Enthusiasm, frustration, joy… and all these reactions lead to what I was talking about in the previous paragraph: gestures! As street photographers, we like to capture these little moments in the street. We do humanist photography where people are at the centre of our concerns. I sometimes take photos without anyone in the frame, but that’s not what I prefer.

I’ll stop here. So what’s that all about? As far as I’m concerned, when I’m out on the street that’s all I’ve got in my toolbox. Light, composition, gestures and interaction. That doesn’t guarantee a good photo, but it’s a good starting point. There are many other things that make a good photo, like things that are less tangible, less visible but that you can only feel. I’ll just mention the atmosphere, the tension, the energy, the mystery… From my point of view, a good photo is not just an accumulation of everything I’ve said, but must include certain elements that will capture the viewer’s attention. It also has to ask questions. What’s going on here? Why is someone reacting like that? What’s going on outside the frame that’s causing so many reactions? If I spend time on a photo asking myself all sorts of questions, it’s because I think the photo is a success. I’m not a big fan of the current fashion for visual jokes such as superimpositions or juxtapositions, or the hyper-graphic photos that are all geometry and contrast. These kinds of shots are empty and are just good for Instagram.

Very often it’s in post-processing that the photos really reveal themselves. When I shoot, I don’t see everything. I see things as a whole. I’m going to disappoint some people, but unfortunately for me, I can’t say that I saw exactly everything that was happening in my frame and that I clicked at that precise moment. No, that’s not how it works for me. Except in cases where there’s only one element in my photo, very often I feel that things are happening and I can make out more shapes than anything else. These shapes are parts of the image that I find interesting. For example, in the background on the left there’s a little scene, on the right there’s a static figure and in the foreground there’s another person. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear … For me, it’s during post-processing that the magic happens of discovering the final image.

For me, a good photo is a captured moment. It doesn’t have to be fantastic (but it can be!). It can be distressingly banal, but it’s a moment, a fragment of life unfolding before us. On the other hand, I don’t believe in the ‘decisive moment’ attributed to HCB. Why decisive? Because it marks the point of maximum tension? the tipping point? The most important moment? That was the American translation: the decisive moment. If we refer to the HCB’s book, the French version of the book was ‘Images à la sauvette’. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with it! It’s true that you capture a moment and that’s what I prefer in the street. But as for weighing it down with the adjective ‘decisive’, personally, I wouldn’t do that for my work.

So that’s my point of view on the subject. I don’t know what John has written at this moment. I have no doubt that the two posts will complement each other and you’ll get the point of view of two different people anyway. I think I share with John a fairly similar vision of Street Photography, but we nevertheless have different sensibilities. I invite you to read his article here.