Portraits

To finish of the year, here are some photo portraits spanning fifty years. What is portraiture? How does it differ from any other kind of photograph of someone?

The defining characteristic is that these are all more or less posed. The sitter contributes to the result by intentionally making an expression, or holding their body in a particular position. The sitter knew that I was waiting to click the shutter. The trick is to make the image not look like a mugshot.

I learned a lot from my evening classes with Jorge Lewinski decades ago at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication) when I was working as a photography assistant.

The final two images are of the painter Emmanuel Levy, who was a student at Manchester School of Art at the same time as L.S. Lowry. Both studied under Pierre Valette. Emmanuel Levy's charcoal portait of me can be found here.

Shop window

Looking through the contact sheets for my more recent black and white photos, I realized that not a few are of shops and storefronts around Sheffield city centre. I have never previously considered this as a 'theme' but they say something about the city and the streets I have walked up and down with my point-and-shoot camera.

Digital Lomography

It could be said that the term 'digital lomography' is an oxymoron because 'Lomography' refers to photography with cheap/ plastic film cameras (like the Lomo).

For me, it means letting go of preconceptions — giving up any pretence of making 'artistic' photographs and just enjoying the process, letting random chance dictate the shapes and colours that appear in the frame.

A basic consumer-model digital camera is perfect for this, and a lot cheaper than film. There are no limits to the numbers of pictures you can take, less inhibition about pressing the shutter.

The two cameras featured are Canon SD780 (1) and Hitachi HDC-1491E (2-6).

Silent Sheffield

These images of Sheffield go together with my 2015 posts Urban landscape and Documentary images.

Why were they overlooked? The photographs are more conventionally pictorial. They don't 'say' anything. They are silent. You would hardly believe that the City of Sheffield is a bustling, thriving metropolis. There's also a sense that 'you've travelled one thousand years into the future after all human life has gone — and nothing has changed' (Photography and the uncanny).

In their muted way I find these images sad — and also disturbing.

Cracks in reality

Or this could be called 'anomalies in the Matrix'. The earliest of these was taken in 2014.

The mundane is everywhere, it surrounds us. But even ordinary things can become objects of suspicion — the suspicion that there is 'something wrong with the world'.

Building work under a bridge, a selfie caught in the reflective roof of a coffee shop, a mother dancing with her daughter, a man putting something into the boot of his car (or taking something out?), a woman walking past graffiti, an anonymous skateboarder — moments that passed unnoticed, moments without any significance. And yet, looking at these now, I have the sense that I am seeing something that was not meant to be seen...

Every picture tells a story

Scouring through my black and white negatives from the last 16 months or so I found these images, which I had neglected first time around. I am getting to understand better what moves me in a photograph. I don't want to know the whole story. There has to be something left out, left to the imagination, hinted at, half hidden and half shown.

I could tell you how I came to capture these images but the information would be irrelevant, mundane. You don't need to know. Better make up your own narrative, or just leave the unanswered questions open, and let your imagination roam.

Transgressions

There are photographs you take, but don't show, not because they're 'bad' for technical or aesthetic reasons, but because you've crossed a line. It could be giving away too much information about yourself (the wonderful scene in 'Three Days of the Condor' between photographer Faye Dunaway and spy-on-the-run Robert Redford when they're discussing her black and white photographs). Or it could be plain bad taste. But I'm thinking of those occasions when you stick your camera where it's not wanted...

Taken recently, with my latest purchase from eBay, a little Fuji DL-150 80s point and shoot camera. I snapped the image in a narrow shopping alley in Sheffield, and carried on walking. Behind me I could hear female voice shouting, 'That man just took my picture!' I hurried along, not even glancing back. The woman in question, with heavily tattooed forearm and carrying two half-full Coke bottles is followed by her mother, grandson in arms. A surprised shopkeeper looks on.

A companion image to Glenda!, this was taken in the print finishing room of Derek Ritterband Photography in 1970 where I worked briefly as a black and white 'line and tone' printer. Glenda was an ex-model turned receptionist. Dave was the young assistant (also seen in the Glenda pic).

This photograph goes with the last of the images in The figure obscured, of an 'in-flight dustbin (trash can) lid'. So now you can see what caused the trouble.

Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, Soho, London some time in the early 70s. (Note the young woman's floppy hat and clunky shoes.) Another 'shoot and run' scenario.

A blustery day in Sheffield some time in the 80s. The woman could be shielding her eyes from the bright sunshine reflecting on wet paving stones. It would be consistent to read the photograph that way, regardless of what actually happened. Does that make the image OK?

I was curious about this little photography shop and didn't notice when one of the staff appeared in the doorway. After I explained what I was doing, it seemed to be OK. 'I like your Leica,' she said, commenting on my plastic camera.

This photograph belongs with the set Sheffield Lanes. Snapped in the main shopping street in Sheffield around Christmas time, this fur-coated shopper is clearly not used to mixing with the hoi polloi.

Photography and the uncanny

This is no mere faint shudder or tremor, or a momentary shadow crossing your mind. I'm talking about the feeling you get when an invisible hand grabs hold of your guts and twists them. Or when you sense that you are falling, faster and faster, and everything around you becomes a blur.

When Death smiles at you...

Helpful lady at the Sheffield Google pop-up website advice centre. It was Halloween so she let me take a photo of her in her mask...

Just a telephone kiosk, except that you've travelled one thousand years into the future after all human life has gone — and nothing has changed...

In Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence Robert Denoon Cumming devotes a section to the 'wiggling bottom'. This one didn't wiggle at all...

Two seconds after I snatched this photo, the infant flopped out of its mother's arms onto the paving stones of Sheffield's Peace Gardens. — I hope not.

A tableau/ shrine constructed around an old newspaper cutting — and another image of death. I don't know whether the addition of a teddy bear was intentional or not, but that's the element that gives your guts a twist.

You probably won't get this. It doesn't matter because I get it. It's what I'm after.

I read somewhere that all photographs are uncanny. It's their irreducible, recalcitrant contingency. The difference is that contingency is what these photographs say as well as show.