Photography is the art of capturing those unexpected and marvelous moments that happen in daily life. The legendary photographer Henri Cartier Bresson says, “Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.”
The Quote definitely explains what we really need while capturing the street photographs. This chapter also contains some of those moments in streets captured right in the moment. Some of the marvels happen in the daily life streets and no one can arrange those unexpected moments.
Mysterious Look : A woman in Pushkar, peeking out from her group and watching me in very curious way.
It is not what you see. There is always a second story hiding in the frame. It doesn’t always concern itself with the “truth.” A moment is never the entire truth, but only a fragment of truth. For me a good street photograph is a story, though the story may be confusing or even one you’ll never be able to understand. There must be interesting human behavior in the picture something beyond a simple shot of a person or people. There should be an element of mystery in the story, and unless the picture makes you think, it’s not much of a street photograph. As I learned it is a powerful art form, it’s also a way of recording what people and really are like. Capturing & Documenting the street photographs totally depend on the timing.
Morning Blues: A Man in a street of Mulick ghat flower market, Kolkoto heading towards work with a very serious facial expression, while the laziness of early morning dancing silently. We see the man with the cycle rickshaw first, but the interesting story is behind him.
It is always fun to solve the riddles right? Same, I want my photographs to be subtle and viewers should try to understand the subtlety. Here are some of my street photographs with subtle stories captured at various places like Pushkar, Mumbai, Pondicherry & Kolkota.
We don’t always need people in frame, or capturing interesting situations as many different people into frame. It may be difficult in some busy places, but taking a walk down a quiet alleyway or side street and look for different subjects that interests more. These two photos here are not taken from any highly populated areas or from any famous tourist places. The big image here is taken in Kolkota under some bridge and another small image here on alleyway in Mumbai. It is always up-to us that how we observe and look into the streets.
The Busy ness: This photo is taken in White town, Pondichery. Our main concentration goes on those group of people, but the story lies with the cycle rickshaw puller’s business with his smart-phone. No wonder, technology has grown up.
As one of the greatest photographer of all time Elliott Erwitt says,
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
You saw the continuity of subtleness in finding the real stories in simple pictures in the last pages. In the other words, perspective matters for me. Sometimes pictures are very simple, but only when you took it from the eye level, how about making them fascinating by taking them from different perspective? It becomes more subtle.
Here, in the first picture, a family sitting round the bonfire to warm them up in the early morning, while mother is trying to teach something to her children. In the second picture, a beggar is receiving money from a pedestrian while having a tea in the morning.
The Cozy street: This is the photo of street in the Chor Bazaar. We are seeing people busy in thier daily routine of business in early morning, but does the story ends there? Illegal business is running legally.
How simple are the photos, but the perspective? When I see the stories in the streets, I always try two things le., to capture in the way, that I could convey two stories from a single image & the other perspective images which creates subtlety in understanding the story.
It’s a common misconception to think that we can only do street photography well in the most interesting of areas, or that we will get better photographs if you travel to Varanasi or some other tourist places where people are more. That is not true. We can take good storytelling images anywhere, and it doesn’t have to be a highly populated area for us to be able to take interesting images.
Composition of Curiosity: A mother and her two children looking very curiously. Here, the story is not about those who are posing the camera, I am very curious of what might that small kid looking at with that curious face.
Traveling to places like Pushkar, Mumbai, Pondicherry, Kolkota and capturing those amazing moments in the streets was a delightful experience. It helped me to understand more about different people, different streets, different emotions of different places of India. These stories never end. And it has no end. Daily-life marvels never stops. It’s just, it is very subtle. If we try to understand the subtleness, life goes on very smoothly. Capturing becomes easy. As I said before, when we learn more about the people, we learn to live peacefully.
Happiness: Children carrying firewood from one place to another for daily purpose with full of happiness. How beautiful to see this picture, if you can see the happiness in their faces, but how bad to see them work.
As David Bailey states that,
“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
Breakfast club: Three children having breakfast with too many questions in mind.
Yes, in streets everything is ordinary, but once we understand that ordinary, nothing is subtle. We always can try to see beyond the main subject, and see if we can combine it with other elements to create a more complex scene. The consistency in my photographs is that they are often different and weird, and it can be impossible to truly get a sense of what I am trying to portray. Hence, this article is very much needed to explain every photo, so that viewers can understand.
Right?, what’s worth of capturing those amazing moments when people do not understand.
Copyrights: All the photos and text in this post are the copyrights of Vijay Raj M G, Karnataka and Creative Hut Institute of Photography and Film. Their reproduction, full or part, is forbidden without the explicit approval of the rightful owners.
