Street Photography, Edinburgh

I am, without doubt, a complete amateur at street photography. In fact, my knowledge of photography, in general, is limited. I've owned perhaps one digital camera in my whole life, bar the one on my phone. On finding an old Nikon F3 analog camera in my parents house in Ireland I decided to take it with me back to Scotland. It would be interesting I thought to try my hand at a new skill, learn a few techniques and perhaps make some personal attempts at visual art. That is if you deem street photography an art form.

Old Waverley Hotel, Princes St. Edinburgh. 2020

This is one of the first shots I took with the F3. It's mediocre and doesn't say very much. Rather it was an exercise in basic functionality. Could I take a picture at night using an analog Camera? Would it come out all blurred or totally underexposed? It was taken using Kodak TMax 3200, a good B+W film for low light or night photography. While this shot is basic, badly exposed and has no real story or context it hinted at the possibilities of photography as a means of expression. What could have been just another touristy snapshot was rendered in such a way that the image became an abstraction of its true content. The hotel seems to float in the darkness like some kind of ghost ship. By accident the image took on some kind of new meaning, to me at least. I would remember the settings I used. A small lightbulb flickered on somewhere in the backrooms of my mind.

So where to from here? After shooting my first roll, with varied results from okay to terrible, I would say I was already hooked. I have never studied visual art but have always loved its immediacy. And yes, I would personally see photography as an art form when in the right hands and eyes. I quickly set about doing some digging, scouring the internet for respected street photographers. I came across many. There is a vast ocean of work by countless photographers and it's growing by the day. I was just never really aware of it. This image, by Garry Winogrand stuck me as an example of how a street photo can present reality without artifice and still seem like a well composed artistic statement. Of course, how we read this photo is completely personal. I was very moved and excited by it; to me a mirroring of how time and society transforms us as humans. The two little girls are ensconced in play on a New York sidewalk while the women are pulled into the surging demands of adult life. They are mothers, protectors, they hail taxis. But they were also once those two little girls.

Gary Winogrand. New York City. 1968

So, I thought, we can tell stories, present ideas, abstract the world around us using the camera. The street could be explored. The everyday could be documented. And perhaps if we are lucky, through this practice we could capture some moments that might speak to someone, might move them or surprise them or give them insight. What I didn't realise straight away was just how transformative this practice could be on a personal level. Regardless of whether I would take any good photos, the act of going out and looking at things, at life, with a new sort of eye, with a new sort of curiosity, would quickly become a form of therapy, a meditative practice, a kind of reawakening to things.