Howdy!! And, as they say in the Land of the Long White Cloud, “Tau Hou oaoa!” (Happy New Year!) Anyway I’m really pleased to welcome you back to my photo-blog, thanks for taking the time to stop by and hang out with me for awhile. I really do appreciate your company and any comments you might have along the way. So, in the spirit of welcoming, I have put the kettle on for you, the chocolate hob-nobs are in the tin there beside you and there’s fresh scones in the fridge if you fancy them. Help yourself to the Rhubarb Jam and there’s clotted cream in there too. Naughty I know, but nice!

I’m launching into 2022 with a blog post about a project that I’ve been working on (and off) for the last few months. Projects are the lifeblood of any aspiring creative, it gives you something to do, to aim for, rather than just simply snapping pictures. You’re compiling a body of work themed around a subject, which makes it that much more meaningful, renders depth to it and opens out potential for storytelling. As I have become more ‘competent’ as a photographer I’ve become less satisfied with simply going out just to take photos with no specific objective. I need direction.

Having a motive, an overarching theme, is so much more satisfying. These purposes don’t need to be grand or sweeping ideas, merely a reason to do what you’re doing. For example, photographing the same location as it changes through the seasons or capturing the ebb and flow of a favourite cafe or market place. Choosing a place or subject as a project immediately creates deeper meaning to any images you produce within that series, they’re connected. Stories begin to form, and they in turn inspire new ideas about things you might encounter along the way.

Last year for example, I choose to visit Blackpool on several occasions throughout the Season, to document the vivid characters and goings on along the famous old Golden Mile. Blackpool has become one of those party places like Las Vegas, that people go to lose themselves for the weekend. Blackpool is lights, glamour and action. But what I wasn’t really prepared for was the deprivation and dereliction that I found as I wandered beyond the Prom and looked behind the colourful façades away from the seafront. I found myself increasingly drawn to these areas, actively documenting them as a contrast to the lights and glamour of the Prom. I guess that’s what happens when you start on a project, along the way you find new associated stories and you follow them.

So I thought I would (or perhaps more correctly ‘I should’) write about a photo project that I have been working on for a few months now. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me that feels slightly, I dunno, embarrassed or self conscious about it. From the outside looking in it’s a project that might seem just a bit odd or weird; I have felt distinctly ambivalent about it especially in the early days. The reason being my project involves me riding around on local buses, taking photographs from the top deck as I judder and lurch around the City. It does make me feel self conscious at times, we live in an age where peoples motives for taking photographs in very public places have become suspect, with motives far darker at work and with people more suspicious (understandably) than ever of anyone using cameras in such places.

That said, I am at a point in my photographic life where I’m looking to plough my own furrow. I want my images to be, at least in part, a reflection of my life and my creativity. But the thing about that is you can’t do things purely in isolation, you need context and inspiration, ideas are borne from other ideas. During the Covid lockdowns I spent a lot time reading about or listening to people talk about photography and art. It kept me interested, made me think about what I want to do with my photography in the future and sent me down new directions. And that can only be for the better, right?

During that time, quite by chance on social media, I stumbled upon a thread about street / documentary books that were being recommended by fellow Togs around the worldplacewossname. One book in particular, by the American photographer David Bradford, caught my eye. It’s called ‘Drive by Shootings – Photographs by a New York Taxi Driver’. It’s not a new book by any stretch, dating from the late 1990s, but after getting hold of a copy quite cheaply I fell desperately in love with it. Essentially the book is a vast catalogue of Bradford’s photos taken whilst he worked as a taxi driver in New York. These photos are not easy on the eye, they’re rough, grainy, dirty monochrome images of a city in constant motion. His images were all shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 film, snapped constantly from his driver’s seat, through car windows and glimpses through his mirrors, grab shots of passengers and people passing by, glances up at city architecture and billboards, streets of lights or the darkness of road tunnels, swathes of traffic in front of him, it’s all there in inky, grainy, black and white.

It’s wonderful and exhausting, there’s so many images to process, a multitude of vistas seen at weird angles amidst a blurry whirl of speed and energy. I admit I was instantly hooked by the concept and by the volume of images Bradford captured. There’s a compulsion there, an addiction to image making, that really spoke to me, because I identified with it. I felt, oddly, relieved. Here was a photographer like Me, one who felt compelled to take photos of the world all the time in constant encounters on the street. And he’d found a way to do it productively and inventively that embraced how I feel and it inspired me.

What’s wonderful about Drive-By Shootings is that a great many of Bradford’s photos are technically terrible. They’re blurry, under-exposed, wonky, poorly focused and sometimes have no discernible subject matter. But as you look, really look into the images, you begin to understand. And then viewed as a complete body of work, moving through the pages like you’re riding along those steamy city streets in his taxi, they begin to take on new meaning. You’re his passenger, seeing New York as he experienced it, glimpses and glances of life, faces in the dark, traffic queues, billboards, fragments of architecture hang above the dark city. It’s exhilarating and I felt a deep connection to it immediately.

I’d read quite mixed reviews about Drive By Shootings and his subsequent publications, not everyone has felt so enamored by his images, but then you can’t please everyone I suppose. For myself I found myself really identifying with Bradford’s methodology, because I do the same, taking my camera everywhere I go, ever-ready to capture life as it happens. I also revisit the places, I don’t fret too much over things like technique because I just love the process of shooting, enjoying the sheer size and scope of urban life and just wanting to capture it all.

What’s ironic about all this stuff and nonsense about identifying myself with his work and methodology is, I’m utterly a devout non-driver, first class pedestrian! I walk pretty much everywhere! I’ve never felt any real love for driving. Growing up my parents took us everywhere on public transport, that was our norm. As a teenager I did learn to ride a motorbike, I had a CZ then an MZ and much later a really lovely Honda. But throughout that affair unfortunately I had a habit, I fell off a lot!! Well, yeah nah, falling off sounds like it’s poor balance doesn’t it? Accidents happen a lot to motorcyclists, and I had more than my fair share. And after one painful thigh-slashing crash too many, I finally fell out of love with the process, who needs love like that? So, when walking doesn’t suffice and I need to travel, public transport has always gotten me where I need to be (most of the time) in good and timely fashion. After reading and re-reading Drive by Shootings, I had an idea. Admittedly not a totally original idea, but perhaps, in an adapted way, it is.

I’m 95% a digital photographer, I shoot with both Fuji and Ricoh cameras, which I love using. I do shoot a little film too, but it’s expensive these days and so it’s a dabbling here and there with an old Canon SLR and latterly a medium format Holga, which I plan on having some fun with as we move into Spring, but really it’s just dabblings. Most of the time I carry my trusty Ricoh compact around with me, it’s my go-to camera, reliable, unfussy but also not perfect. I love how it renders images, rather filmic, slightly grainy, delicate almost papery thin in places.

Unlike the rich punchy images you can get with more complex cameras the Ricoh’s images feel leaner, and yet they possess a supple strength, like a bantamweight boxer. It’s a hard concept to convey….. but in many ways the Ricoh’s images feel very ‘analogue’, especially when shooting in black and white. And that got me thinking (rests chin on hand and stares thoughtfully into distance….). Could I capture a series of images that reflect my experiences of public transport, unique to me and my life? After all, I’m a devout non-driver.

Well, yes, why not? I travel by bus, I’ve spent a lot of my life on a bus. God that sounds depressing, ay? And therein lies the rub. Taking photographs on buses is hardly inconspicuous and could be seen as, well, a bit odd. Yeah yeah yeah, get it out of your system now, throw your worst at me – I know I’m odd already. It’s the self consciousness and feeling like I’m doing something illicit (or being accused of it) that I struggle to deal with. I’ve had some shitty things said to me in the past by ‘fellow passengers’.

I catch the bus most days, at least one way to work, depending on the weather. I live 3 miles from my work so, it’s a good walk or a moderate bus journey (traffic depending). I will often walk in the mornings, especially in the colder months, I enjoy the sparkling frosts, the glittering low sunshine and adore those dense morning fogs that seep through the autumn like cold soup. But I digress. The important thing to note is that bus travel is an important part of my daily life. So, yeah that nugget of an idea grew, it made sense (in my mind) to have a go at shooting images as I travel on my daily commute. Being honest, I’d taken quite a few photos on the buses in the past, but these tended to be singular instances taken haphazardly over time, with no particular theme to connect.

This is the first time I’ve rigorously pursued a different style or pattern of shooting throughout an entire project. I’m finding it quietly thrilling, embracing and running with all the things that we usually reject in photography, such as blur, grain, impreciseness, slow shutter speeds, unusual angles and wonky compositions. Using the Ricoh I am able to discreetly but competently capture unusual images that have feeling. By putting my juddering spin on Bradford’s style I feel like I’m making something unique and honest to my life and how I experience my city (if that makes sense??). In the past I’ve enjoyed shooting street photography using slower shutter speeds and intentional camera movements to create a sense of uneasiness and otherworldliness. It’s a fun and unpredictable process that renders uneven results, because not everything you capture actually works as a finished image. Sometimes, no actually, a lot of the time, the results are, yeah okay, they’re rubbish….. But then, oh but then, sometimes you might just catch something wonderful too.

The thing about bus travel is that it’s rarely a comfortable or convivial ride (compared to cars or trains). It’s full of the noises of the juddering bus, bumping along our ruinous roads and the resultant groans of humanity cluttered reluctantly together. However, on the plus side, buses are stuffed full of plexiglass, offering the eye a plethora of fogged up frames trained ever outwards on the encircling City. We passengers stare outwards lethargically, willing the driver homewards at best speed, inwardly groaning at every faltering stop. It’s a shared experience of our modern times that we insulate ourselves from with headphones music or podcasts or escaping into books. Me? I’ve always enjoyed watching the city go by, I’m a visual aesthete I suppose.

From early on in my project I decided to shoot in a particular way that mimics the bus’s motion, all lurching juddering and noise. The images are all in a fairly contrasty black and white style and they’re been taken at speeds between 1/100th and 1/30th of a second, so slightly slower than normal shutter speeds that are rarely sharp or precise. I like the idea of anonymous fleeting glimpses of people and places as the bus passes by, and I usually travel on the top deck of the bus. The view from up there is unique, a spectator’s perspective that hovers just above the street as you pass through the ur-burbs virtually unnoticed by the people below. I’m always looking for the optimum shutter speed to catch the right levels of blur and motion, I’m constantly having to adapt it because the abstraction or anonymity becomes too extreme or the images just lose any sense of form.  Sometimes I just need to dial it back a bit, so that I can focus on one thing in an image, something to ground it on and help make some sense of the image in it’s entirety.

The motion of the bus can be a mixed blessing, that juddering rolling roil can make or break what I’m capturing, especially if we hit a pothole and suddenly I’m taking pix of my feet (happens all the time!).  I’m wary of making the images too difficult to read and alienating the viewer, but at the same time it’s easy to look at such images and think, they’re just terrible photos, poorly executed, the photographer doesn’t know what they’re doing.  There’s a balance I’m trying to find, tiptoeing between deliberate obfuscation and quite obviously crap (I’ll always lean into that, pretend to be arty, Luvvies! Yar!).  And then suddenly out of the grey I’ll capture an image that sits me up straight uttering ‘Whoa!’ and I’m immediately lost in it.  I took one this morning in fact, on the number 48 bus to work. The route takes me through my local area, the streets are invariably bumpy and the traffic stops as often as it starts. Early doors the bus is sparsely peopled, the top deck gloriously empty.  I’m much freer to snap away without worrying about offending other passengers.  The image is of a simple street corner, with a featureless form stretched into the corner, and not much else.  I enjoy it’s absolute lack of focus and I keep looking at it muttering contentedly to myself. ‘That’s it, that’s what I want’.

The images I’ve been capturing I’ve been really excited by because they’re abstracted, imprecise yet full of incident. I don’t care that faces are lost and that human forms morph slightly into weird twisted versions. Recognisable places are transformed by the energy of motion, roundabouts are especially good if you’re able to snap from the back or front of the bus. The bumps of the road throw my angles all akimbo, images become unpredictable, which is both delightful and frustrating. I enjoy capturing images that reflect the inside of the bus onto the outside view. Sometimes, if the mood takes me and opportunity knocks, I’m able to grab a stack of images, especially on quieter days when the buses run fairly empty.  Other times I may only have chance to grab a couple of usable pix, but despite the uneven nature of what I’m doing, I snatch every opportunity to try for more images.  As time has worn on I’ve warmed to the project and become more relaxed about how I go about it. That’s the thing about any sort of project, it doesn’t necessarily end up how you planned it, you adapt and finesse it. Sometimes you even stop it when the critic in your head starts telling you it’s terrible.  It has my voice, behind my eyes a headache that yells in the back of my head telling me it’s crapcrapcrap and that other people produce much better work than me and that I’m an imposter, just stop pretending that what you’re doing is good, justifying this shit is…… so I stop and collect myself. I step away for awhile and then look again with fresh eyes.

I’ve included in this blog a sample of what I have created thus far, but my project is nowhere near complete. I aim to travel more around the city, gathering more unique images that suggest a different way of viewing our city. From a bus a passenger’s view is one that is askew from the norm, like Bradford’s taxi photos but floating unnoticed just out of sight. I’m trying desperately not to sound pretentious or arty but I’m sailing close to all that hot air aren’t I? Ahh phooey to it. I hope that this project makes me more comfortable in my creative skin. In the past I’ve always tried to get the ideal photo, absolutely sharp presentation, optimum focus, successful composition. But in pushing against those conventions and trying to find the right way to present a body of work that feels like you’re really on the bus with me, I am feeling so much more energy from the scenes and looking ever deeper into them. I don’t want to alienate viewers but at the same time, I want to stay faithful to my aims and objectives. So you’ll just have to suck it up and like it or lump it 😁

I get a real buzz from this project, it excites me. I’ve been able to cast off the strictures of sharpness, thrown caution to the wind and two fingers to the pedantic nature of photography, it’s been quite joyful at times. And fun. I’m aware that I’ve talked a lot about the influences on what I’m currently doing but not a lot about WHY I’m choosing to shoot in this manner. You know what it’s like, you go down a rabbit hole and it’s only when you come up for air that you realize how far you’ve travelled without leaving any signposts on how to get back home….. I confess I’m deeply attracted to the concept of anonymity. Oh jeez, it’s only when you read a sentence like that back, that it dawns on you how creepy it sounds! I mean, shooting in this way, as a lofty viewer over the sights that pass beneath my window, I’m lent a degree of separation from the situations I am capturing – I’m removed, remote, anonymous. Normally, taking street photos for me is all about being in amongst the hither and tither and yon, because that’s where you can capture those wonderful gestures and happenings so particular to candid street photography. It’s what gives me the kicks as I wander about in my bouncy Sketchers.

But this project is different. I’m not involved directly, I’m deliberately remote, an unobserved observer. But because I’m usually moving at speeds that vary on the road, I could easily have chosen to use faster shutter speeds to freeze the action I’m witnessing from the bus – it would make sense to do so in fact, because then you could perhaps make out what is going on better. But that’s not what I want to do, I enjoy the sense of mystery and anonymity that the slow shutter creates. Faces are blurred, sometimes even blank, the motion of the bus combined with the dragged shutter abstracts the scene from ordinary reality.

One of the things I’m particularly enjoying about this project is the lack of detail. It’s speaking to me in a way, creating an emotional response to the city as it passes me by. I do fret though, I worry that potential viewers might not feel a connection to these images or simply just not get it at all.  But I suppose that’s a risk you take in creating any body of work and, ultimately the first viewer always in my mind is me, because that’s who I’m trying to please first and foremost.  I guess I’ve gained enough confidence to just go for it and damn the lot of you.  This is about me and how I want to express myself as a photographer,  a creative and a human being.  That probably sounds pretentious but it’s really not.  As a photographer I am trying to capture images that say something and express ideas and emotions (I hope!).  I’m not trying to be arty or overblown, but to be articulate in what I am doing.  The thing about digital photography is there’s an ongoing technological obsession with preciseness, sharpness and capturing reality in absolute minute detail, presenting you with everything so you instantly understand what you’re looking at.  It’s all an illusion of course, nothing in reality is ever precise or absolute, and what you’re seeing on screen or in print is merely a digital interpretation of reality. And whilst there’s literally nothing wrong with any of that, where’s the mystery in all of that, where’s the space for imagination, emotion and interpretation?  If everything is presented in absolute, immaculate detail, where does your eye or your mind have to go if everything is just given to it?  I like images that don’t give you everything, I’m happiest looking at images, especially paintings, that don’t answer all your questions, that make your eye linger for longer because many of the details aren’t there – your mind has to fill in the gaps, your imagination has to be engaged.

That all being said I still have that headachy voice in my head spouting criticisms and sparking worry, it’s part of who I am. I’m also very aware that amongst that many millions of other photographers around the world there will be some who are bound to be taking photos on buses like me. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen several books featuring documentary photos themed around buses, but I can’t worry about that. I can’t be paralysed by fear, I can only do my best and use this project as a gateway for my creativity. I freely acknowledge my influences, I embrace them and take them forwards with me, free in the knowledge that what I am doing is particular to me. I know also that my camera points where I want it to and that what it captures is unique to my experience of the world. I look out of the window, often into darkness, throwing caution and composition to the wind. So, let’s see where this bus takes us, shall we? 🙂

There are lots more photos from my Top Deck project in the gallery on my website, link included below. I really appreciate you sticking around to listen to my blatherings. Your thoughts, comments and critiques are all most welcome, thanks for reading! Be well! ➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️ https://jayjayjjetplane.myportfolio.com/top-deck