New Roll / Actually Tried Something Different For Once (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Talk To People) (Patreon)

This is Kodak Portra 160 shot through my Nikon N60. Here is the new gallery on Flickr and all the pictures on Drive.

For this roll I gave myself a challenge I (mostly) adhered to: the photos needed to contain people.

True "street" photography (like that done by Winogrand and Frank) is not really something I do. Street photography is about capturing chance alignments of life and people in a socially revealing or compositionally interesting way. Much of the work I did of Seattle this winter is utterly devoid of life; it is landscape work of environments shaped by people, rather than street photography. I think this reflects both my inner mood about America and the state of street photography in the 2020s.

The problem with street photography now vs. its heyday in the 60s is several-fold. For one, Seattle's streets do not offer the anonymity or pedestrian-density of 60s NYC to try and find interesting alignments of people. For another, Patagonia and slacks are not visually interesting, much in the same way that a silver RAV4 does not spark interest in the same way a bright-yellow Checker cab does.

But vastly more importantly, in a culture so saturated with surveillance that untracked movement is increasingly impossible (and with ever-increasing amounts of clandestine, unannounced police activity against people not formally accused of a crime), street photography has sinister overtones. I do not want to deny other people's valid anxieties about omnipresent surveillance by surreptitiously taking personally identifiable photos of them. I feel weird with an unannounced camera aimed at me; why wouldn't someone else?

Besides, street photography as classically practiced by men has always felt like the hostile male gaze made overt. Often, the subjects chosen are "othered" in some way by society that feels interesting to the (usually white straight male) photographer. I think by now it should be clear that I don't like the approach of dehumanizing photographic subjects down to "other"; ideally, they are participants in the process as much as the photographer.

This is all a long way of saying that I took these photos by asking the people in them first if I could take them. I would spot people in a compositionally interesting arrangement and if they seemed amicable, I'd chat with them and get permission to take a shot as they went about their lives.

Some of these, of course, are just my friends on days where I told them I would shoot photos as we went about our days. (These often feel less staged and more real to me, because they were.)

A chunk of this roll is also a rooftop shoot I did with my friend after she got a new latex dress, since I was extremely excited to shoot latex on film. (Posed shoots like this are obviously much more typical for me!)

But at least some of these are, I suppose, an early Victoria Scott attempt at "street photography", like this. I did not know this woman (although I do now, after we talked for quite a while after I approached her), and I just thought everything about her outfit and book was shockingly vividly interesting.

I'm glad I tried this experiment, and although I do like some of my choices in these shots, I do think a lot of them still aren't where I would like them to be. It's tricky - I think I need either a more personal, tighter look, or a looser scene altogether to make these non-candid-candid shots work more often.

But hey, it's fun to try new stuff sometimes, so whatever.

I got back two other rolls in this batch I'll edit and upload later, and those are my normal street-landscapes, and they're exactly what I wanted. It took me about a year, 1.5 years of practice to reach a point where I'm satisfied with 90% of every roll I'm getting back with that style. So maybe if I pursue this that long, I'll get there?

I'm still not sure if I want to actually pursue this style, though.

As I've slowly recovered from surgery, I am trying to determine where my life is headed, photography included. I reached out to a couple potential co-hosts with a photography podcast pitch. I've pitched an automotive book that might get some traction in the near future. I have also continued pitching outlets with stories, although everyone is so overworked and underfunded it's getting bleaker by the day, it seems like.

I talked with a really good friend who's very knowledgeable about the economy what's up with it, and he was like "no one knows". So like, I really have no fucking clue what I'm doing or what photos I will be taking. I have ideas, but ideas are cheap!

Anyway, I've mostly recovered, and I am feeling good, so I'm deeply thankful for that. I'll try and get those next rolls up here in the coming week.

Vicki <3