Street Photography

Week 35 - Two Odd Shoes

BY DEREK CLARK

This week in Scotland, we had about three hours of sunshine and the rest was rain, rain and more rain. I Managed to take a short walk with my X100F, which is nice to still be using, even though I have the V.

Stepping out of the car, I remember once more that my AirPods are still missing in action somewhere in the Edinburgh area after I mislaid them while shooting a jazz concert. I have headphones in the car, but it’s around this point I start cursing Apple and its infinite wisdom in removing the 3.5mm headphone socket. There just isn’t room for it they said, yet my iPod Nano was around 8x smaller and half the thickness. Just admit that it’s all about selling AirPods multiple times to people like me that keep losing them!

Anyway…I digress.

My observation on my short walk is this.

The photographic muscle is like any other; you must exercise it or it will go flabby and fail. Most of us know this and have done for some time, but what I have come to realise is that you can’t exercise one muscle and expect all the others to tone up too. Likewise, you can’t shoot Landscape and become a great portrait photographer.

This might be obvious, but for me, being out on the street with nothing but the F felt both liberating and odd. It felt like wearing a running shoe on one foot and a hiking boot on the other. I had swapped my X-T4 for the 100F for this brief amount of time and I welcomed the change, but I was learning to walk again. To see the way I used to see. To feel the way used to feel…about photography.

ALL SHOT ON X100F - 23mmf2 (35mm FULL FRAME)

Definition 021 | 39 Last Street

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Photography and words by Jonas Dyhr Rask

Camera slung across the chest, closing the door to the apartment behind me, getting hit by the pulsating life and sounds of the vibrant city life.

It was how I really started photographing those 9 years ago. I bought myself an X100 camera, and immediately hit the streets. It evolved from there, that’s for sure. Over the course of two years I got sucked in deeper and deeper. It was almost like an addiction. It was an addiction.

I would get lost in it for hours, days even. I still do.

Street photography has become such an integral part of me, that when I’m not able to practice it at least twice a week its like holding my breath past capacity. It feels like I’m choking.

It doesn’t have to be thematic. It doesn’t have to be documentary. It just has to be.

All the time, it has to be.

Today was the last chance to go shoot in the city before I turn 40 on friday. Looking back at my 30’s they contain all my photographic experiences. When I was 30 I shot my first street shots. It’s crazy to think about, so I try not to. I don’t want to dwell. I want to push forward. Look forward.

So today, I did what I do at least twice a week.

I drive to the city, camera slung across the chest, closing the door to the car behind me, getting hit by the pulsating life and sounds of the vibrant city life.

I breathe.

I photograph.

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(all shots shot during an hour this afternoon. Shot on the X-Pro3 with the XF35mm f/1.4)

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Definition 002 | God's Lonely Man

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BY DEREK CLARK

““The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.””
— Thomas Wolfe

I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but that quote has followed me almost all my life. It has been moving around in my mind for decades, sometimes slipping to the back, sometimes pushing to the front. I’ve spent a good part of my life being alone and you could say a chunk of my teenage years and my early 20’s being a loner. But although I’ve found the perfect mate, I have two great kids, and a small but tight group of close friends, being alone is an important part of who I am. As a general rule; the larger the group of people, the more alone I feel. But when this is applied to the streets, something is different.

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Kids have got it backward these days. They (and I’m generalizing) have this lust to be famous. To be recognised. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I love to move through crowds of people without them taking the tiniest bit of notice of me. I’m a documentary photographer and as we work through 2020 and our Definition project evolves, that should become apparent. I consider street photography to be at least part of my documentary work. Perhaps it’s the purest form of documentary?

Catching a train and heading to the city to shoot on the streets is my drug of choice. I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t do drugs (not even prescribed ones). But I crave the ultimate me-time. Just like being an alcoholic or a drug addict, a loner is always in recovery...we just fall off the wagon more often. It’s lonely out there on the street with only a rectangular box and a piece of glass for company, but I love it. I walk an average of nine miles in a typical day’s shooting. Sometimes I’ll pick a spot and shoot for a while when the light is right and falling the right way. I have places I hang around as the sun is going down because I know it bounces off the buildings and funnels into a perfect pool of light for an all too brief amount of time. But mostly I just keep walking. As Alex Webb has said 

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch, and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the next corner.”
— Alex Webb

So I savour each trip to the streets. Sometimes listening to the sound of the city, the traffic, the arguments, the beggars, the over-enthusiastic preachers. But quite often I have my earphones in, listening to various movie soundtracks and making the act of street photography that little bit more cinematic (in my head at least). And if you will forgive me for using just one more quote from Robert DeNiro, this time in the movie Heat. “I’m alone. I am not lonely.” On the street at least.

This is why I don’t take drugs…you never know where they’ve been.

This is why I don’t take drugs…you never know where they’ve been.

In The Second City of the Empire

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I’m a street photographer, and for me that equates to candid pictures without asking permission. But for this latest Kage assignment, I wanted to get out on the street and ask if I could take peoples portrait. I went out with a Hasselblad 500c/m with an 80/2.8 and an X-Pro2 with a 50/2. I wanted to capture the men of Glasgow with as much character on their faces as possible.

An old man near the train station was causing a bit of a commotion with a piece of religious artwork. Although he looked impoverished, he had actually commissioned an artist to create this painting and having just collected it (on his wheelchair), he wanted to show it off.

I was given a poem about a female athlete by the man with the silver hair and I was asked on several occasions if I was from the press. People are suspicious about cameras these days. It seams that if you shoot with anything other than a phone, you must be press or up to something dodgy, even with an old Hasselblad.

Around one in three said yes to having their portrait taken. In the end I only used two shots from the Hasselblad due to a problem with the lens. Medium format film or a 1.5 crop sensor, can you tell which two are from the Hasselblad without looking at the metadata?

October 17, 2018 at 11:50 pm (Tokyo, Japan)

Photography and words by Jonas Rask

Ending the study of capturing the mundane everyday.
Ending the stories that lie in everyday living.
Ending the narration.

In Japan. A place that for me is not mundane, nor everyday.
But for some it is indeed.
Mundane everyday
Everyday Living,

Ending the narration.

October 10, 2018 at 10:10 pm (Maarslet, Denmark)

Photography and words by Jonas Rask

I have a thing with numbers. I guess it is what drives my sanity in times of chaos. Its about absolute order of things. It has been like that for as long as I can remember. I always excelled at math instead of linguistics. I chose the mathematical line in high school, and obviously ended up in medschool. So numbers are a big factor in my life.
The Chronicle 90 journey is almost at the end of its lifespan. Again it was a quest of numbers. 90 days. 1 post a week.
Next week I’ll be visiting Fujifilm in Tokyo, so this week is all about preparing for that trip. Mostly about dates, hotelsbookings, time schedules, etc. You know…. the numbers.

So imagine my delight when I saw todays date.

10 images today. On 10/10. At 10:10

Now that is a journal entry in its own right. Regardless of story.

October 3, 2018 at 06:26 pm (Maarslet, Denmark)

Photography and words by Jonas Rask

Last week was ‘Kina 2018 week. As I’m sure you probably know by now I was there giving 3 talks. So was Bert, Patrick and Kevin along with many others from the Fujifilm “family”. Yes I call them family, cause that is actually what it feels like to be around this particular group of people. It feels safe. I feel that I can be myself. I have strong feelings towards many of them. So yes, this is just like a family relationship.
I’m humbled beyond words to be able to have this in my life. I’m grateful for everything that it brings me. This is so far from what I expected when I took up photography those almost 10 years ago.

As with any great thing in life that must come to an end, the withdrawal effect can be overwhelming. And thats what I’m going through this week. Withdrawal.
I force myself to pick up my camera, but the mood of it all is rather dark. So I go with the flow, and do what my slumbering overloaded creative brain wants me to do. I embrace it.

So today is dark. Today is abstinence. Today is longing.

September 26, 2018 at 07:33 pm (Cologne, Germany)

Photography and words by Jonas Rask

Seeing old friends, making new ones.
This is the part I like.
This is what brings a smile to my face.
The rest resembles a charade

September 19, 2018 at 06:39 pm (Mårslet, Denmark)

Photography and words by Jonas Rask

Seeing old friends, making new ones.
This is the part I like.
This is what brings a smile to my face.
The rest resembles a charade

September 3, 2018 at 21:40 pm (Motherwell, Scotland)

By Derek Clark

My friend Steven needed to go to Glasgow today to film some B-roll for a project he's working on. So I tagged along and shot some street while he grabbed some footage. It wasn't intentional, but when I started to look at the photos in Lightroom tonight, There was more than a few people lost in their phones.

The world is a beautiful place!
Life is far too short!
These things are worse than the crack pipe!