Street Portraits #2

This zine by Cafe Royal Books and Syd Shelton features a curated selection of street portraiture.

These portraits are a sort of ongoing conversation with people in the theatre of the street. My approach, in some ways, has more in common with the studio photographer, and as I have returned many times to the same location, somewhere like Hare Row in Hackney I even called ‘my studio’. Usually I like to position people in a shallow theatrical space with a fixed backdrop and the combination of favourable available light which provides the venue for that conversation. Sometimes the trust between photographer and the people I am photographing happens very quickly and other times it takes a long time for the camera to disappear, and for it to become about me and the person I am photographing — there becomes a sort of implicit contract between us.