A3: Submission

Assignment images

 

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3

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6

Assignment notes

Assignment brief

• A series of 6 to 8 photographs.
• Exploration of the ‘decisive moment’, either following, questioning or opposing the traditional approach. 
• Free subject, but there should be a linking theme. 

Subject introduction

This is a brief documentation of the dominant lifestyle in a post industrial city like Manchester. Most of the jobs performed in the city centre area are focused on shopping and food industry. Modern life in a city like this basically goes around work, either in an office, a shop or a restaurant, going shopping after your work shift and go back home. This pictures are meant to provide a view on some moments of this modern life cycle, moments that go pretty much unperceived but that can encapsulate an aspect of this life style on a fraction of a second, pretty much what street photography is.

Work process

I worked with a 35mm full manual Olympus camera and Kodak Color Plus 200 film for the whole series. I personally consider 35mm the ideal medium for street photography, given its fast nature (compared to medium or large format) and its “single-opportunity” quality, in opposition to the endless uses a digital sensor gives. You have to think better each shot and you’re therefore much more aware of your surroundings, your look is piercing, as Cartier-Bresson would say.

I took the photographs in the Manchester city centre between 12 and 3 p.m. over various week days. That time of day is when the streets are busiest, with workers and shoppers buzzing from their work place to shops and restaurants. I used colour film primarily to distance my work from more classic approaches, to avoid some of the romanticisation that black and white often implies.

The edition work was quite easy, I used 3 rolls, what left me with over a hundred photographs to choose from. The selection/elimination process was led by three main criteria: is it a decisive moment? does it fit my subject choice? and does it go well with the rest of the selections while adding nuance to the documentation? I finally selected the photographs that I thought met the best all criteria and discarded the ones I considered not to be good enough or too repetitive, ending up with the final 6.

Decisive moment?

Image 1: The homeless woman covers her face at moment of the photograph while a person leaves the frame in the right side and another looks out of the frame in the left side.

Image 2: All three pair of feet are on those precise positions, relative to each other and relative to the urban elements, all of them with one foot before the other. The visual relationship between all of them would be totally different, probably not that balanced, any other second.

Image 3: The man takes a hand to his mouth as he walks under the black stain on the wall and he’s reflection projects on the wall. The reflection somehow increases the stress that the man’s position expresses.

Image 4: The man on the furthest left exhales the smoke of his cigarette as he looks at his feet, as the man on the right observes the tram arrive.

Image 5: Both women look in the same direction as they arrive at the end of the escalator each with one hand on one of the railings. If I have taken the photograph any second sooner or later they wouldn’t be looking that way or they’d have walked out of the escalator.

Image 6: The woman and the mannequin (a classic in street photography), are on balancing positions to each other while they wear completely opposite outfits (lingerie vs. winter clothing). And the lady’s umbrella is exactly lined up with the floor tiles.

A3: Editing

After spending three Kodak Color Plus rolls while walking around Manchester for a few days I though I might have enough material for the assignment. I stayed close to the Arndale shopping centre (the biggest British shopping venue in a city centre) while the city workers usually have their midday breaks. Manchester’s city centre is quite representative of what a modern city is, focused mostly in shops and hospitality and with a high percentage of office workers too. Between 12 and 3 p.m. the city streets are packed with workers having a cigarette break, Deliveroo drivers, office workers buying a meal deal in the closest Tesco and of course, people having a shopping afternoon.

After printing the contact sheets and analysing the pictures in bulk I was happy to see that a few of them could be representative enough of what this way of life is like. As I said on the previous post, an endless cycle of going to work, shopping and coming back home. After discarding every failed photo and everything that definitely wasn’t a decisive moment I ended up with 18 images that I analysed individually with two things in mind: is it a decisive moment? and if it is, is it representative enough of what I want to document?

The final 7 image selection comprises a series of moments of the day to day on a modern urban city. Beggars, smokers, shoppers, street walkers… they sound like common elements in classic street photography, but when observed in a contemporary context and photographed in colour they certainly don’t have that romantic quality one could observe in some classic work.

I didn’t realise this until the end of the editing process, but I’ve unconsciously avoided to show faces in a clear way, perhaps as a way of focusing the viewer’s look more on the collective than on the individual. There’s frozen movement on every image too, something that could be considered quite necessary in a decisive moment oriented work,  but that also helps to emphasise on the idea of the modern life as a non-stop life.

A3: Ideas and approach

• A series of 6 to 8 photographs.
• Exploration of the ‘decisive moment’, either following, questioning or opposing the traditional approach. 
• Free subject, but there should be a linking theme. 

I’ve been practising street photography for as long as I’ve been practising photography. And when I first faced this assignment I considered doing something that would still be street photography but didn’t fed on cliches, perhaps even go against the traditional approach to the decisive moment. I did some work with this perspective on mind but after showing it to fellow students and tutors on the student forum I came to realise that it didn’t really show an understanding of what the decisive moment is. Therefore I thought it’d be best to start from scratch with a new approach.

I decided to do my thinking for that new start in the Manchester Art Gallery, particularly in a room dedicated to A. Valette’s and L. S. Lowry’s paintings. Sitting on that room, I felt inspired by Lowry’s urban scenes of an industrial, dirty and exciting Manchester that doesn’t exist anymore. I decided then that the connecting thread on my assignment would be a documenting of today’s Manchester, a modern city where most of its inhabitants live in a continuous cycle of “going to work-go shopping-go home”. My intention would be capturing on a single frame some aspects of this modern life.

In contrast to Lowry’s work, that depicts on many of his paintings what could be considered as events and tended to use masses of people I decided to focus instead on individual people on simple day to day scenes, I wasn’t looking for nothing too remarkable about the context my photographs would be taken at and the intention would be using the individual as a reflection of the collective. This was partly due to the influence of photographers such as Thierry Girard, who doesn’t consider himself a journalist but a chronicler of ordinary life.

As I kind of failed to show an understanding of the decisive moment on my previous effort, I decided to just do what I consider I know well, images in the right moment and in the right place that would be representative of what I was photographing. I wanted to just chase the decisive moment, be eyes open and walk the streets waiting for the right moment to press the shutter. From the work I did before, I really enjoyed using colour 35mm film, so I decided to repeat that experience. In fact, I highly doubt I’ll use digital for any more assignments on the near future. Besides, the one time quality of film seemed more appropriate than digital media for an assignment around the decisive moment.