Category: Street Photography

Street Photography & Integrity

  So much photography these days is put to work to sell us something, commonly products or services, maybe ideas or beliefs or appealing to us to give to a cause. Sometimes the photography is working hard to sell us the photographer, his/her uniqueness as an image maker or innovation with ideas. In most of these cases the image itself is worked hard, often worked too hard. It is saturated, it's contrast is adjusted, it's sky is darkened, it's colour balance made more filmic and finally every ounce of sharpness squeezed out of it's pixels before it explodes momentarily into the public arena in a blinding blaze of likes. We are all targeted all the time, they want our money and billions are spent on clever visual messages with the sole aim of extracting the money from our pockets. At the cinema before the film they target my children, in the urinals during the intermission I am offered Viagra while [...]
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‘On The Night Bus’ is published 17th Nov 2016

After four years of cold wet winter evenings photographing London bus commuters returning home to the suburbs my project is published as a book by Hoxton Minipress. The hardback book has 104 pages with a cloth covered back case and spine, gold foiled. The book is 160 x 228mm and contains a foreword by renowned novelist and commentator Will Self. The book is already available to preorder at Hoxton Minipress. Here is a video walkthrough of the book... On The Night Bus from Nick Turpin on Vimeo.  
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Photography and Public Transport

  The most common misunderstanding about Street Photography is to assume that it is about a location, the 'Street', when it is really a particular 'approach' to picture making in any place that the public gather. It is not surprising then that Street Photographers make great pictures in art galleries and museums, on beaches, in parks, malls, arcades and on trains and buses. For the last three winters I have taken advantage of the dark evenings to photograph discretely into the top deck of London Buses, the pictures reveal intimate moments of commuters journeys between work and home, a strange lost time that they fill by reading, sleeping, staring, thinking and engaged with their tablets and phones. People in transit tend to adopt a small temporary territory, their seat, their bit of window, their half of the arm rest and they diligently ignore those around them in the hope of being themselves ignored. Words are not spoken, eye contact is [...]
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Street Photography: Feel the Force

  Street Photography is an Attitude   More than anything Street Photography is an attitude, it is an openness to being amazed by what comes your way, it is unlearning the habit of categorising and dismissing the everyday as being 'just the everyday' and beginning to recognise that extraordinary, beautiful and subtle stories are occurring in front of you everyday of your life if you can see them. I actually think you can be a Street Photographer without a camera and without making photographs, it is really just the more insecure Street Photographers like myself that actually have to record and show off their ability to 'see'. How many other forms of photography essentially have 'wonder' at their heart? That's what makes Street Photography almost a spiritual process for many because it is so personal and so akin to a kind of photographic enlightenment. Street Photography helps me understand the nature of my society and my place in it, I [...]
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Street Photography Pie

I take a lot of flack online for attempting to maintain a fairly rigid definition of Street Photography, I know a lot of people, including some very notable ones don't even like the phrase 'Street Photography' but I think that horse has really bolted decades ago. Street Photographers were once men that would take your picture for payment on the sidewalk, that definition changed very quickly when the first role of 35mm film was put in a Leica camera by Oskar Barnack around 1913. It was really the photographers that took up those small portable cameras over the next 60 years that inadvertently redefined the phrase Street Photography to what we recognise today...a documentary form that celebrated the candid public moment. And now wether you like the phrase or not there is unarguably a large and growing international community of photographers for whom it is very important that their approach to making pictures is purely observed, whose intention is to [...]
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