A lil love letter to street photography, and an apology for leaving you for so long, but not really, because everything is street photography, and none of it is, its all just MY photography.
When I was a fledgling little photography baby, like so many other photography babies, I tried everything, sports, birds, sunsets, flowers, macro, action, panning, abstract, just throwing things at the wall, and I enjoyed a lot of it, but it wasn’t until I was in Downtown Crossing one now forgotten day in 2007 where I met Johnny Mac, Bobby, and Joe, the three old timer street photographers who stalked the busiest parts of Boston making what to me felt like momentous and unimaginably cool work. Working fast, daring, sneaky, bold, brazen, gonzo, they shot people without a care for anything but getting the shot, I took my first baby steps into the work that would come to define me as a photographer for the next 9 years.
I was hooked immediately. As often as my school and work schedule allowed me I would make my way downtown, or to the back bay, newbury st, central square, wherever there were crowds, and especially office workers on lunch break, or going home all at once at 5pm, and through this singular focus to my work I fell in love with specific focal lengths, lenses, ways of working. I learned sunny 16 through street work, zone focusing, scale focusing, dragging the shutter, I learned how to look like I was cluelessly futzing with my camera while surreptitiously snapping shots a foot from someones face. I learned to deflect conflict, and how to court it. I learned when it was best to walk away, and when to stand my ground. More than anything I learned that the tales of artists sitting in Parisian cafes sipping espresso and discussing the nature of art was a thing that still happens, here, in my city, in Dunkin Donuts, sipping the most dogshit coffee ever brewed, but the conversations made it more special than you can imagine.
But I walked away from those endless sessions downtown, my life changed, I got busier, I got rejected from grad school, and sat and thought about my work with a detachment that caused me to pivot, hard, into work that was wholly different, and at the time felt right, and for a great many years I didn’t look back, I had found my voice in photography, found my calling, my work, my niche. And for a time I had, and then that ended and something rose from it’s ashes, and that felt right, and still does, and then a new facet revealed itself, and that became important, and one day I realized I was, and could be, many types of photographer all simultaneously, and not take away from any one way of seeing or making photographs.
In just the last 6 weeks it’s truly dawned on me that all the work I make, if I enjoy making it, is worth making, and the big takeaway from that is that I want to return to the streets, and at least once or twice a week when I can work a little shift downtown, take it seriously, rehone those skills, even if it’s not the work that grad schools wanted to see, even if it doesn’t “do numbers” online, even if I just take them because I enjoy being among the crowds, and spending time with my fellow street photographers, I still run into Johnny Mac downtown after all, he’s never fallen off, even if it’s just for fun, it’s worth doing, and worth doing well. So I’m doing it. And all the other stuff, I have the energy and desire and drive, I can’t not do them all.