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.””
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.
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.”
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.
