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I came across a post to this London-based photographer’s flickr collection and his work is brilliant. His portfolio primarily consists of photographs taken in London’s streets and subways; no studio or posed shots here. They are rich with clever visual puns and they even achieve, at times, a kind of pathos.
I have always found a maddening tension at the point where the experience of city-living and the practice of photography meet. The city is such a profound spectacle, a ceaselessly unfolding performance written in razor-thin moments of time, but its tiny dramatic intervals are only seen and marveled by those who are really looking, and are more often than not missed entirely by a poorly-timed blink, by some distraction coming from another direction, or by the general dullness of spirit and sensation brought on, paradoxically, by excessive and overpowering urban stimuli (see Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life for more on this timelessly Modern idea). In Baudelaire’s era, the poet meandered through the city, gathered experiences and distilled them into essences post-facto, through a process of creative synthesis. What the advent of photography (and more specifically, the invention of the portable camera) introduced was a much more discursive approach to capturing the evanescent moments in the city. Memory and interpretation and ‘poetic fudging’ became extra-dimensional, error-prone, re-gurgitated facets of experience when squared against a mechanical shutter which was capable, within a 1/400th of second, of indelibly etching reality into photographic emulsion. Those charming, but fleeting moments which, except to the most vigilant or sensitive souls, were hidden beneath the rushing torrent of time, found a tool of authentic record that could freeze invisible moments, and open up their private experience into a shared one.
But the technological capability of capturing those moments didn’t mean that those moments, once captured, retained their ineffable qualities. The critical but slippery distinction between photography as a technique and photography as an artform would hinge on the image’s ability to transcend its documentary nature and embody, as Baudelaire would have seen fit, an aesthetic, a poetry, a story. On any specific basis of qualification those are really hard to pin down, and I won’t try to get at it here (Art History was my minor degree, after all, ha! For further reading though, Susan Sontag’s extraordinary book On Photography is worthy of a gander). Cop-out aside, that question seems more and more relevant (or irrelevant at the same time too, I suppose) given our hyper-prolific tendency towards, as well as our appetite for, the production, manipulation, storage, and exhibition of photographic images, in our age of the digital camera, Photoshop, and the internet (as evidenced by photo-archive websites such as flickr).
Poetics aside, there are also issues of praxis. Photographing someone, as a concrete set of actions, goes far beyond mere observation. For example, I know several photographers (my amateur self included) who have never felt comfortable whipping our cameras out and directly shooting a stranger on the bus or on the street. Is that reflexive sense of politeness or anxiety a hindrance to our ability to commit the images we see to film? If so, then doesn’t that represent a compromise, a triangulation between the artistic temperament and will of the photographer, and the not-necessarily-passive receptivity of the subject? Photography is not a purely aesthetic or technical artform, but it is also an act that is often a clandestine and intrusive, and my own hangups over its ‘operational necessities’ dictate the extents of what I can and/or am willing to do with a camera. In my own case, I can only stick to landscapes and still-lifes, while appreciating from afar what photojournalists (but not necessarily paparazzi, say) do everyday.
However nebulously great urban photography is made and defined, like they say about porn, you know it when you see it, and you see it in Henri Cartier-Bresson, you see it in Robert Frank, you see it in Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and you see it, I think, in Nils Jorgensen.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
