It can be difficult to create a style of your own when you start taking photographs, even more-so when you are trying to fit into a certain genre, and yet again harder when you lack the experience of an artistic education. I confess that much of my style is still in flux, and much that is a mistake I have yet to learn from; but there are a few methods or elements that I think contribute to the aesthetic signature that I view as mine. The greatest starting point is to shoot film, specifically black and white film. This is in a way a defining characteristic of the genre of Street Photography, as it was retained by artists such as Ravilious, Koudelka, Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith, long after Ektachrome and Kodachrome had become standard for documentary magazines such as National Geographic. Similarly, another defining trait of classical street photography is the use of ‘Normal’ lenses, 35mm and 50mm, though lenses as long as 90mm have been occasionally employed by notable artists, and modern street photography has tended towards accepting 28mm on the wider end.

It is often said that a good film photographer should not hop from tool to tool to tool, but concentrating on mastering a particular camera and a particular film. Like many, the tool of my preference is a Leica M-series camera. Much ridicule is made of amateurs in the field of Street Photography for their obsessions with this product; a commonly held generalization is that Leica cameras are bought by those with no eye, in the mistaken belief that the magic of the red dot will somehow improve their photographs without effort. My personal reasons vary somewhat from this perceived normal. Like many in my generation, I suffer from a programmed tendency toward materialism and the view that newer, and shinier is always better. My choice of equipment is an attempt to subvert this, and to subvert the ‘general’ Leica view. By using equipment that has been proven not by a reviewer in a short video clip but by hundreds of photographers over many decades, I remove any opportunity for my subconscious to excuse my failings. A tool that was serviceable for the finest artists can never fail me; should a flaw be evident in my work, it is of my making alone. No small part of my decision rested also on the durability of the M as well, with all the parts for my camera not only still available, but still manufactured.

When it came to selecting a camera film to serve as a partner beside myself and my camera, I wanted to select a product that I was confident would remain available into the future; so that I could maintain some consistency of my aesthetic. This naturally ruled out any product by Fujifilm, as well as the niche manufacturers like Orwo; despite the high quality of their products. The natural choice would be either a film from Ilford, or from the newly resurgent and profitable Kodak Alaris; however I found that Tri-X was distasteful in the nature of it’s grain, and Ilford films seemed in some ways too bland, and clean. I was looking for an older emulsion, with plenty of grain, and character. The film I finally discovered was Eastman-Kodak 5222, commonly known as ‘Double-X’. It is a motion picture film, produced in small batches for niche uses in the entertainment industry. While there are several manufacturers such as Cinestill that repackage it into normal 135 canisters, the 600% markup applied made it unpalatable. As such, my first experience with Double-X was the receipt of a chilled canister of 400ft of film. My somewhat reckless purchase of such a large quantity paid off and it proved to be everything that I had been looking for. For me, the ideal way to get the look I wanted was to abuse the film heavily, underexposing and pushing the film by three stops. This worked well with my preferred old and single-coated lenses, giving a rich and detailed image with balanced contrast.

One area where I am still experimenting is in the development of my negatives. This was initially bound by the local availability of materials, and lead to many of my early negatives having an undesirable mottled look to the film grain, a result of a modern film developer that was intended for only low, box speed films that modified the structure of the crystals. My current process is based on the ‘Semi-Stand’ method, using the classic and grain enhancing developer, Rodinal. This gives plenty of texture, without degrading the highlights too far. In addition, I regularly test other films to ensure that I’ve made the right choice, as well as in consideration of different kinds of photography where I may need a different aesthetic to properly render my subject. My newest experiments are in the use of ID-11, an Ilford copy of Kodak’s standard D-76 developer, which was originally designed for the Eastman motion picture emulsions.

It is my opinion that the only way to produce heritage or fine art quality prints is through a fully analog process, using a high quality enlarger and lens. Hybrid methods are inherently limited by the resolution and dynamic range of the scanner, software and printer; all of which are discrete quantities. Ink also has a very limited lifespan, whereas properly stored silver-gelatin prints on high quality paper can last almost indefinitely.  Perhaps more importantly, there is a more intrinsic value in an analogue print that derives from it’s rarity, and from the work undertaken by an artist to produce it. Every analogue print will differ due to the subtle changes in time, brightness, and developer concentration that are not possible to replicate perfectly. Every exposure to the hot light of an enlarger will also degrade the original negative creating an ‘upper bound’ on the number of prints that can be made from a single frame, and a slow an subtle change in the printed photograph from the first print to the last. Neither of these limitations can exist on a digital copy, that can be repeated time and time again with no imperfections and with no work by the artist. Artificial attempts to increase the rarity of digital prints are done solely to exploit the consumers of art, who lose the direct connection with an artist and their work, created through the labor of a real darkroom print. That said, analog printing onto the internet, or into mass market publications is unfeasible to say the least and for those purposes I scan in 16 bit with a high resolution film scanner, built solely for 35mm film. My work is then edited (slightly) using an old, pre-subscription version of Photoshop and exported as jpeg.

As fascinating as the technical aspects of film photography are, an aesthetic is not defined solely or perhaps even primarily by the medium or processing used – but by the eye of the photographer, and her methodology in selecting, framing and focusing. I alternate between the three common approaches to street photography, perhaps well described as the ‘Cartier-Bresson’, ‘Vivian Maier’ and ‘Lomography’ approaches. My reason for this is that I am still very much a student in photojournalism, and I still have days where I lack the confidence to approach a subject boldly, as Maier would, or to wait patiently like Cartier-Bresson in his catlike approach, sat before the mouse-hole. I have a preference for the Maier approach, as my interest lies not in geometry but in emotion; I look to Koudelka and Ravilious in their illustration of ritual and custom, to Moriyama Daido in his dramatic capture of emotions at their most feral through a Lomographic snapshot approach. The patient approach I favor the least, but it is a skill I find worth practicing for those moments when a scene, or its lighting presents itself so perfectly and a subject is all that is missing.

It is a defining characteristic of my personality that I am a claustrophile and a demophobe. In many ways this is what leads me to street photography, putting a viewfinder between myself and the people around me allows my conscious mind to transform them from a threatening mass to a fascinating subject. Many of my shots also follow this style, as I look for narrow and boxy streets and small squares where I can avoid the terrifying expanses of sky and sea and pavement, hiding from the throngs in the boulevards and searching for the individuals who go about their lives at a slower and more cautious pace. At the same time, I make a point of photographing protests; using an extremely wide 15mm lens by Voigtländer and getting extremely close to my subjects, in the heart of the crowd and unable to move. While I find this a stressful experience, it is also rewarding and one of the rare opportunities to document social change or frustration in a country known worldwide for it’s stoic attitude of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.

If I were to name a single thing I think would be beneficial to my work, it would be to engage in more defined projects. An interesting contrast between this generation and those preceding it is a more relaxed attitude to personal style; while previously fashions could be very strongly defined by era, even decade or year, in our postmodern culture there is a much more relaxed attitude with styles from more than a century ago co-existing with those from the inter-war and post-war periods alongside those of the last generation and todays. More strikingly, not only do these personal styles coexist peacefully on the same street, it is even common for them to coexist in the same social circle, a modern progression and tolerance that was previously very rare.

I also have an interest in traveling, looking at cultural differences across the world and how they are harmonizing and polarizing among the opposing forces of communication-derived progressive globalism and the newborn rise of extremist nationalism. I’m also interested in using novel tools of the renewed Film Photography market such as ultra-low-speed film and ultra-sharp lenses (for example, my coveted “God Kit” of the 35 APO-LANTHAR, 75 APO-SUMMICRON and 135 APO-TELYT) and reconsidering classical artworks through the lens of modern photography.