We’re only a couple weeks in and I’ve already been impressed with the portraits people have been taking and stories you’ve been coming back with.
The portraits have a different depth to them with the added interaction.
Instead of waiting for the recap, I wanted to share a few of these early to give some inspiration and more motivation.
Nearly ten years ago, I reached out to a local neighborhood blog asking if I could do a new feature for them, stopping, interviewing, and photographing people on the street.
What followed was a weekly 5.5 year project of nearly 200 interviews called East Village Stories. The project became an oral account of the last handful of decades in one of the most vibrant communities in the city.
Complete strangers opened up about their past and the neighborhood, took me around, and many even took me into their homes and businesses. It was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life.
I’m sharing these stories to give you some motivation, and an understanding that people want to open up. This is fun for them too.
My most exhausted days, where I would want to do anything but stand on a corner harassing people for a story, often led me to find the most incredible people. Pushing myself to do it turned into the most wonderful experiences. A couple of the people below I would start to see all over the neighborhood and have many more conversations.
Now of course your stories don’t need to be this involved. And to keep your attention, the few stories I chose below are some of the most unbelievable.
I don’t want you to think this is what you need to do. Everyday people have fantastic stories. And just getting a person to open up for a short bit will often help to yield an incredible portrait.
The camera is just a tool. It’s just a tool that will give you an excuse to meet someone.
Give it a go, push yourself a bit, and you will create some memorable experiences.
The mundane challenge, like a few of the others, was a building block challenge for your photography. Similarly, I want this challenge to be the same, and it seems like a good time to do this during the doldrums of summer (and winter).
There are two parts to this challenge and you can feel free to do one, do all, or do none.
For this recap, I think saying less is more.
We all, myself especially, waxed poetic about what was mundane and what wasn’t, but in the end… whatever.
Thinking about what was mundane and what wasn’t was just to get you to open up and think more about your everyday world for inspiration.
What matters is taking interesting photos. And in the photographic world, mundane can be interesting, extremely interesting, but where the photo stands on the mundane-meter just doesn’t matter.
Here were the photos that stood out the most for me, although this was a hard challenge to choose, especially when thinking about my own biases for what was truly mundane.
My feelings were that the mundane photo be a scene of some sort – something everyday, but still a photo that felt like part of the everyday world.
Although you’ll see some great examples that slipped through that definition.
And it had to be a good photo. Something you’d want to look at. Even though I can see the argument for taking photos that people don’t want to look at.
The photos below to me were interesting, but showed objects with less of this context.
But they’re still interesting photos, and placed all together, I find the photos all grow together.
And here were the others that I thought stood out, although some hit higher on the mundane meter than others.
Next challenge will be announced in the next week!
Happy 4th everyone! And Canada Day! Hope you’re taking some time off, and some photographs.
Don’t forget to email me your Mundane Challenge photos to [email protected]. The deadline is this Monday, but if you need a few extra days, that’s okay.
We’ve been so serious about everything lately, waxing poetic about the mundane, that I think it’s time to lighten things up.
An easier read for today.
Here’s a description of the progression of your everyday street photographer. Please take this as tongue in cheek.
First of all, I really enjoyed the photobook talks we had recently. I learned so much about The Local from all of you.This is going to be a regular feature coming up.
The next book meeting I think we’re going to schedule a few site-wide hangouts to make it work for people in different time zones. I’m thinking of alternating these book meetings between the group meetings and site-wide as I’d like to balance the group dynamic with also having flexible meeting times for everyone.
Now lately we’ve been covering a full range of topics surrounding street photography, especially how to do this in quiet places, suburban places, in your home, etc.
But I don’t want to leave the more traditional street photography out – the candid people photography, the decisive moment, the serendipitous, whatever you may call it.
Here are some thoughts and ideas that I wanted to talk about regarding this aspect of street photography.
The Local by Nick Meyer
We had an interesting conversation this week comparing two photos. It’s an eye-opening thread. Which one do you like best and do you like them at all? And there was a great followup discussion about two quotes related to ideas of context brought up during the comparison.
I think we’ll share some member work in this way soon to get some community critiques as it’s fascinating to see everyone’s thoughts.
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Since we will be starting more hangouts based on projects and photobooks, I thought I’d write about things to think about when going through a book.
The photobook is an artform inside the artform of photography. It transforms the individual photograph and can give it more power to tell a story, create an emotion, or push along a narrative.
Whether creating a project or reading a photobook, you can see that a whole new set of parameters exist. How do you most effectively tell a story? What’s the right amount of photographs to use? Do you show a broad array of photography (portraits, closeups, wide environmental shots for instance), or do you keep the type of photography very tight and consistent? How much work do you allow the viewer to do to figure out the story? And how do you sequence the work for maximum effect?
It’s a tough puzzle to figure out. This post is going to ask more questions than give answers.
Here are some thoughts about photo books.
I met Zachary on the Manhattan Bridge while giving a workshop. She was hanging out there smoking weed and agreed to let me photograph her. We all had a nice conversation about photography and art.
But getting the right photograph was extremely difficult. The pole of the bridge was in the way and she either gave me some good poses (which were too posed) or she was engrossed in the conversation so much that it was tough to get her to stay in the right position or engage the camera in the right way.
So we kept talking and I’d occasionally put my camera up to ask her to hold a position or to put her hands on the bars. I really wanted to see her rings. And I kept getting closer with the composition as we went on.
Finally, I got the one I wanted with the last photograph at the last moment that could have worked – She was engaged here but also lost in thought with a poignant expression.
Sometimes taking portraits like this can feel like walking on a tightrope.
Stephen Greenberg
It was very interesting to read through all the comments on your biggest struggles with your photography.
Thank you to everyone for opening up – there’s power and inspiration in everyone coming together like this and being open and honest. And it helps to hear we’re not alone in these issues.
I share a lot of your struggles, and my biggest one right now is slowing down. It’s getting tougher to leave behind the chaos and speed of regular life, clear my head, and focus when I’m out photographing.
It’s so hard to turn the brain off, slow down, and just go with the flow, but it’s so necessary.
David Robertson
Elisa Carandina
*The next challenge will be announced during the week, so keep an eye out for that!
Here are the challenge selections for Challenge #4 – there were so many entries (260 photos in total) that I couldn’t show them all – and I don’t think that would have been beneficial anyway.
So I narrowed them down and split them into categories: color, black & white, objects, and an example edit.
Just because some of your photos didn’t make it here doesn’t mean they weren’t good. I did my best to choose photos I related to. And there were some good photographs I left out because they didn’t really fit the challenge.
This was a hard challenge. Alec Soth spoke about not trying to force things with your photography, and I think this was a challenge that made people force things. But I still think it was an important challenge to open your eyes to this sensibility in your work.
Jonathan Snyder
But you can’t force emotion. It comes when it comes and it builds naturally.
While individual images can certainly have emotion to them, I think that the most effective emotions can be built up through a sequence and body of work.
It’s the time, the nuance, the intimacy, the succession of photos that ultimately can create the most emotion and we were lacking all those factors in the constraints of the challenge timeframe here.
So while there are many fantastic photos, it was sometimes tough to escape that forced feeling. But going forward, I think these sensibilities will grow naturally in your work.
