London Street Scene. London, England. August 5, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
People on a crowded London street
This will likely be one of those photographs that perplexes people who follow me for my nature, landscape, and wildlife photography. On the surface it seems like the virtual opposite of those photographs, but there are similarities. This is a kind of landscape — the urban landscape — and it is possible to see it in ways not that different from how we might see the natural landscape, with attention to patterns, to light, to distance and perspective, and more. And the people here are, in a sense, the “wildlife” of this urban world.
It is a little bit tricky to articulate just what I saw or see in a photograph like this. Of course, it does “record” a particular scene from a certain busy area of London. But it is also a sort of accidental tableau in which figures arrived in positions and relationships that somehow caught my attention. And, perhaps obviously, color is part of what happens in this photograph. Beyond that, I’ll leave the viewer to speculate.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
“a sort of accidental tableau in which figures arrived in positions and relationships”
You just summed up what makes candid street photography so beguiling. The settings are only half the fun, whether it’s a sleepy rural village or a congested inner-urban area. Any community is interesting to see and make us a kind of ‘virtual tourist.’ But its the purely random appearance of people who a matter of seconds earlier or later would have missed being in the picture that can be the most fun element of a street scene picture.
Thanks for the comment and the observation. Henri Cartier Bresson was aware of this and it was one of the reasons that he was initially attracted to shooting street.
Dan