Back to What I Like

I am currently in the progress of re-engaging with my photography.  My goal is to try and find where my head is in terms of what I like to photograph, but also what I like to look at.  If I can bring the two together I should be in a better place.  This set of photographs and blog entry is a return to a subject that is becoming a thread through my work, the river Isar and the activity along its banks.  I also need to ground my work, to avoid the continual flipping from one thing to another that has characterized my recent work, weddings, underwater, landscape, and so on...

I also need to work out in my mind what I want to get out of the remainder of this course.  I will write about this in a future post, I know what the options are, just not which one to take.  This short set of images is a way to help me to find that answer.

One aspect of my photography is a disinterest in people, but an interest in their presence.  I do not see people as characters in my pictures, but as transient subjects inhabiting a landscape that I am creating.  The following is an example.  This photo appeals to my need for geometry, lines and curves that come together to create a harmony, or chaos.  This is still a photo about people, this is a human place and there are two people in the frame, lending a presence, but a transient and almost invisible one.

The problem with either photo is that the graffiti makes a cultural statement that generates fear.  Deeper into this underpass the walls are covered in graffiti and it is beautiful...  The B&W version even hides the pink graffiti making for a more threatening image.  Somehow a pink heart takes away the menace that might be there.  Herein is another challenge I am wrestling with, working in colour or B&W.  I am still very drawn to mono, but do not see this as a long term thing, just something I need to explore right now.

The next photo describes where my head is at the moment.  This is a documentary photo that portrays a sunny afternoon.  The people inhabit the photo, but do not make it.  Here I am trying to describe a part of the city, building an image from the layers of the landscape.  Without the people it would be an OK image, but with them it is a document of society.  In a way this probably lends more to Joel Sternfeld or Stephen Shore than to Robert Frank, a problem that is beginning to niggle me right now.  I want to write about Frank, but am not so sure about the "In the Style of" bit.

Once again I have taken very different processing strategies.  The B&W is dark and contrasty, the colour fresher more pastel.  That is where the images took me.

A few more with a similar goal in mind, all taken along the riverbank...

Oh, and when I first edited this entry, I forgot to mention that these photographs were taking with a view to learning the use of an auto focus lens - time for a reset.