What the Street Teaches Me

I spend a lot of my working life directing things — where to stand, where the light’s best, when to look at each other instead of the camera. Street photography is the opposite of that. Nobody’s listening for instructions. You just wait, and watch, and hope the street arranges itself into something worth keeping.

Oxford is a strange, generous place to do this. Tourists move at one speed and the city moves at another, and somewhere in between there’s a gap where ordinary things — a cyclist catching low sun, a shadow stretching across a doorway, the particular hush of a street before the shops open — become worth a frame. Most days nothing happens. Some days everything does.

A couple I photographed recently told me, at their wedding of all places, that they’d chosen me partly because of this work rather than the wedding portfolio itself. That caught me off guard. I hadn’t really thought of the street pictures as something people saw, let alone something that told them what kind of photographer I am. But it makes sense — the instincts are the same. Watching for the moment before it’s obviously a moment. Trusting that the unplanned frame is usually the truer one.

This is where that side of the work will live from now on — street pictures that don’t fit neatly into a portfolio grid, the odd project, and whatever I’m thinking about photography at the time. More soon.