Inspiration
Ongoing: March 2021 - Present
Saul Leiter's New York
July 2024
“The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water.” ¹
Saul Leiter’s relentless search for beauty - which mainly took place within a few blocks from his home in East Village - bore many seminal photographs. No one was doing it like he was in the 50s, and in my opinion no one ever has. Through decades of outlandish and radical experimentations with abstraction, perspective, focus, texture and colour he crafted a unique style of shooting that was unmistakably his, and his alone.
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I am still endlessly surprised by his audacity, and that is precisely why I love him more than ever. … I remember wondering: How did he think he could take such pictures and get away with it? His images broke all the rules and yet left you in awe. ²
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Leiter’s New York street photographs are dreamlike and painterly, often taking me to someplace else whilst at the same time feeling familiar and grounded. They leave me with the thrilling combination of wonder and intrigue, and an appreciation for how expansive and masterful street photography can be. A truly consummate and dedicated artist, I couldn’t recommend enough taking the time to explore his oeuvre.
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The subdued colours and patinas transported me in a gust of nostalgia. I was swept away by the powerful originality, the interplay of the abstract and the figurative, the resonances, the reflections, the mood and the weather of sudden moments of everyday New York street life. How, I marvelled, could each slide bring forth a seemingly effortless glimpse of beauty, with colours dialoguing in fragmented and quirky compositions, planes and surfaces intersecting? All of this informed by a painter’s eye certainly, but genuinely spontaneous. These were the free improvisations of a brilliantly attentive flâneur.” ³
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Borrowed from
¹ Teju Cole’s Postscript: Saul Leiter (1923 - 2013) in The New Yorker
² Margit Erb’s Reflections from my years inside the Leiter archive
³ Philippe Laumont’s eulogy as quoted in Michael Parillo’s Saul Leiter had a long love affair with colour. Here’s the story
Street Portraits by Dawoud Bey
May 2024
"For me, the portrait has always been a place where I have attempted to make a very rich physical, emotional, and psychological representation of the person in front of the camera, and to create a momentary relationship or exchange between the viewer and the person in the photograph that the viewer then takes back out into the world, and engages with the world and the human community in a way that is different."¹
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From 1988 to 1991, Dawoud Bey was using his tripod-mounted 4x5 camera to make large-format portraits of fellow African Americans on the streets of various cities in the US. His approach was informal, honest and collaborative - often inviting his subjects to present themselves however they wished, and offering the resulting portrait to them in the form of a positive Polaroid.
Bey photographed a wide range of people - the community’s elders boasting their Sunday best, a young boy with a cast on his wrist, a girl proudly wearing her school medals, a mother and daughter at the table, a women returning from the store, and lovers holding each other tenderly in the park - are just a few examples.
By photographing his subjects close up, and with nondescript building walls, stoops and shutters as his backdrop slightly out of focus in the frame, he allowed the diverse individuality and emotions of his sitters to shine through. And shine they do - inquisitive gazes, that lean, loving gestures and that swag take centre stage, expressed in an authentic and confident kind of way. It’s as if each person is saying “this is me”.
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“My commitment has been for a very long time, to attach that level of complexity to subjects who have not traditionally been seen as having that level of complexity.”¹
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The resulting 73 portraits are presented in Dawoud’s photobook Street Portraits - a profound monograph that celebrates being seen, and reminds us of the transformative power of seeing deeply.
The work is an affirmation of the individual. Of individuality, of humanness. It is intimate and honest, personal and yet communal, aesthetically leaning but socially driven. An example of craft mastery with reaches far beyond the art of picture making.
As a photographer fascinated by the power of portraiture and the representation of people, this book is one of my biggest inspirations, along with the - much-needed - visionary artist who made the work.
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¹ Taken from The National Gallery Of Art’s interview with Dawoud Bey (Sept 2018)
Links
A flick-through of Street Portraits
Buy Street Portraits from its publisher Mack
Hanif Abdurraqik’s moving review in the New Yorker
The Art Angle interviews Dawoud in their podcast
The National Gallery of Art interviews Dawoud about The Birmingham Project
Rebecca Norris Webb
March 2024
“To focus, you often close your eyes while speaking.
Looking through the lens, I dream with one eye open.” ¹
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Lyrical, evocative and pensive are words often used to describe photographer and poet Rebecca Norris Webb’s work. Her books are multidimensional; frequently weaving photography with poetic text. They are incredibly rewarding to read as each pass reveals greater meaning - as we peel away the layers and uncover the metaphors in both the images and handwritten musings.
Perhaps this depth is down to her approach. Rebecca shoots with film and purely from instinct. She views her work as a way of collaborating with the world, and with every project remains open to the possibilities this collaboration can bring. She also favours long-term projects that allow her time to meander, ruminate and be enlightened by her photographs.
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“It’s taken me much of life to understand and accept that my images are wiser than I am. It often takes me weeks and sometimes months to understand what they are trying to say to me.” ²
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Only recently have I come to truly appreciate her wonderful work. I find it beautiful and incredibly inspiring. It feels like the type of work that will stay with me forever, work that has substance, work that I can come back to throughout the trials and tribulations of my life. I’d highly recommend it.
I feel Rebecca needs more flowers for these projects notably:
Her second monograph - My Dakota - which became an elegy to her brother who died suddenly of heart failure. Night Calls - her third book - which is set in Rush County, Indiana, where she grew up and where five generations of her Quaker family lived. It is Rebecca’s meditation on memory, the passage of time and family history, and can be interpreted as an homage to her country doctor father. And last in this non-exhaustive list: Slant Rhymes which is a collaborative book she made with husband and frequent collaborator Alex Webb. This is a beautiful ‘visual poem’ where Rebecca and Alex riff off each other’s photographs with their own text and images made over the course of their 40 year career. A creative nod to an enduring Love if you ask me.
¹ Taken from Slant Rhymes
² Taken from an interview for The New York Times (see below)
Links
Rebecca and Alex Webb’s website
Lenscratch interview Rebecca about Night Calls
Radius Books interview Rebecca about Night Calls
Mystery Street by Vasantha Yogananthan
February 2024
“I was in New Orleans during the summer; school was out, it’s that moment of the year when time expands. There is freedom but also boredom. It is a particular season, that of the summer vacation. It’s when you learn about yourself outside of school and home.”¹
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Predominantly set on a sports field and within the confines of a summer camp playground, Vasantha Yogananthan’s Mystery Street follows the daily activities of the summer camp’s participants. At a transitional period in their lives where they are no longer children and not yet teenagers, we see them at play, at rest, in competition with each other, and supporting one another. Vasantha captures gestures of tenderness, gazes of contemplation, expressions of elation and moments of fragility and ennui. On one level the project could be interpreted as an intimate documentary of children growing up together.
But in my opinion, what is masterful about Mystery Street is that it is Vasantha’s poetic adaptation of youth and of time going by. It is a fable left open to the multiple narratives that viewers’ might infer by looking at the photographs, thanks to what Vasantha chooses to include in his selection and framing, and more importantly, exclude.
The photographs themselves are tightly cropped, always candid and often isolate a subject from the hive of activity that we infer is happening outside of the frame. We are left with unanswered questions and our interpretations to fill in the gap. In one image for example, we see a boy sitting down with his eyes closed - photographed in profile - whose torso is falling backwards. Was he pushed or is he falling as part of a game, and why is he (seemingly) by himself?
Furthermore, Vasantha’s informed sequencing of the photographs offers little context to these children’s lives outside of the summer camp; there are no shots of parents or summer camp coordinators, nor any establishing shots of the locale. With this, he suggests a dystopian space (post Hurricane Katrina) where children have ‘become masters of a city in which adults have disappeared, of a world that has been left to them, a world that is, in a way, on pause’.²
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“As a photographer, one of my biggest battles is using the frame, lights and colour to bring abstract qualities to figurative images. I strive to remove anything that can be too illustrative, that can give too much context, that can overly narrow the scope of the imagination.” ¹
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For this reason I’d say Vasantha Yogananthan’s Mystery Street is an incredibly rewarding photobook to get lost in. It is at first sight beautiful and ethereal, but as we delve deeper we come to realise it is also sensitive and layered. I’d highly recommend it!
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¹ A conversation with Vasantha Yogananthan and Taous Dahmani in the Mystery Street book
² An interview with Vasantha Yogananthan and the Foundation Henri Cartier Bresson (linked below)
Links
Mystery Street by Chose Commune
Mystery Street book flick through
Interview with Vasantha in Photograph Magazine
Interview with Vasantha for the Foundation Henri Cartier Bresson
Further works: Vasantha's incredible seven part series A Myth Of Two Souls
Harry Gruyaert
November 2023
It’s a dance.
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“Photography to me is very much like a dance. Your own body physically moves into a landscape, in an environment, and it’s your eye, your body, [that] moves in this environment … trying to find the things you really like and you’re really excited about and which makes sense. And that’s really wonderful, I really miss when I don’t take pictures for a long time, it’s this …. [acts out the action of having a camera to his face bobbing and weaving to find the right angle]”
Harry Gruyaert
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Harry Gruyaert’s intuitive style of shooting is incredibly inspirational. I absolutely love his framing, sense of colour and versatility as a visual artist. He is able to photograph a chaotic urban environment so that it seems sensical, but also make beautifully sparse photographs of landscapes that look like paintings. Through his use of colour (amongst other techniques) he is able to elicit a wide array of emotions for the viewer - something that I’m hoping to achieve as I seek to improve my colour awareness. In my eyes he is a true master of observation, and - as he views his practice as means of engaging with life and what he is passionate about - I admire his philosophy too.​
Links
A great interview for Paris Photo (the quote above is taken from this clip)
An informative conversation with Roger Deakins and James Deakins
A survey of Harry Gruyaert's use of colour - How Harry Gruyaert Makes You Fall In Love With Colour Photography
An overview of Harry Gruyaert's work - What Harry Gruyaert Saw