Photography & Ordinary Things
The MBA has chewed a lot of time that I’d have otherwise loved to spend exploring my interest in photography. It’s said more than once that I take pictures of quite ordinary things, and I do. The object of what that ordinary thing is about has everything to do with my 15 years looking out at objects everyone feels familiar with and which, in my world, may appear a little more interesting.
I love street photography. The ordinary things ordinary people do are called culture. The faces and circumstances of the street invoke passions and revulsions in me, and memories of other places and times, that I could spend an awful lot of time caught up in capturing it through the lens. The work of German born Australian photographer Mark Strizic, for example, is incredibly interesting. His current exhibition at Gallery 101 in Melbourne called Melbourne – A City in Transition has some great work that I’d love to hop over and see in person. The exhibition is open until May 2nd, 2009.
But street photography seems to have become a lot more difficult, more clandestine, less pure… because of the World Wide Web. Where people might have been flattered or even enjoy having their photograph taken a few decades ago it’s far less likely they would feel the same today. Visit a market as a middle aged man with an SLR and you’re going to rake the interest of parents, young women and public officials thinking about terrorism. The world is different in some way.
Street photographers that I’ve seen over recent years are more the shoot from the hip style or the fast shoot and disappear photographer. What happened to the brilliance of being able to go out there and capture culture like Rennie Ellis.
I understand the trepidation of society towards cameras. Deviant networking, large free internet applications for storing and sharing pictures – we don’t want our image or our childrens’ images on the Internet. Entirely justifiable. Privacy. But in earlier years we knew the limitations of film and were comfortable with the discussion focused either privately or in a physical gallery space. The web has it’s down side, too. It’s degraded the trust in the relationship between photographer and the public. Applications like Flickr and Facebook have contributed significantly to that decline. There are literally billions of photos being pushed around, and we don’t necessarily want to be one of them ourselves. Total strangers invading our daily privacy. Naturally, trust was an early sacrifice of the web.
So, in some sense, my love of ordinary things extends to ordinary people in ordinary spaces. I’m not interested in pretty magazines or creating perfect stock photography. I follow the passion of Mark Strizic, if I can dare put myself in the same sentence, and break most of the rules on purpose by shooting into the sun and playing with perspective, texture, light and shape.
And I’m interested in seeing how people react to simple, ordinary things and situations because we’re overwhelmed with the magnificent, the awesome, the stupendous, to a degree we ignore them almost entirely. What are the pictures that sit with you over a decade? Usually it will be something human, simple, ordinary, and it will have been captured in a different light to how we had previously thought about the subject. It will invoke in us something of ourselves.
The Reva Australia pegs, below, are very ordinary. I have always been aware the ordinary won’t please everyone.
