A Sequence of Composition

I took 32 images in total around the area of Norwich Market. This was my first real experience of street photography and approached it with some apprehension, concerned about other's reaction to my intrusion into their private space.  I remembered seeing a programme on BBC2 that included an interview with a photographer who spent a large part of his professional life photographing 5th Avenue in New York. His advice was to point the camera at the subject, focus and then move the camera slightly still holding the original focus and then take the photograph. The subject of the photograph, seeing the camera move assumes that it is not pointed at them, relax and continue unaware of what is happening. The technique appeared to work and on only one occasion did the subject continue to look at the camera. (He had a exaggerated mohican style haircut and knew that he was going to be the centre of attention.)

I began by taking general shots of the street scene using a wide angle lens (24mm) and trying to convey the sense of a crowd. 

 I then decided to concentrate on smaller groups in an attempt to show elements of a crowd that were distinctive groups. As I viewed the images taken, on the LCD screen on my camera, I realised that although there were distinctive groups the reality was that the majority of those with the 'group' were isolated individuals who happened to occupy an area of space adjacent to other but separate people. The image above demonstrates this aspect with only the group of four at the bottom left of the image being together. Even here closer examination shows that there is very little interaction.

On first sight this appears to be a group of people  listening to a heated discussion between the female in the white jacket to the left of the two men in high-visibility jackets and someone who is not visible in the picture. On closer examination this interpretation is illusory and the photograph has caught a moment in time where the spatial relationship between all those in the image suggest to the viewer that they are interacting with each other whereas they are simply  'passing through'.

I thought about cropping the image to take out the bicycles in the foreground but felt that they were symbolic of the barriers we, as humans, place between ourselves and others.

Whilst in the photograph of the group above the presence of the bicycles was accidental this image is a deliberate attempt to emphasise the unseen barriers that exist between people . (It occurred to me as I was writing this that it could also be argued that I, as the photographer, had used the barriers to isolate myself from the subject thus avoiding any unwanted response.)

Following on from the unseen barriers hypothesis referred to above if we look closely at this image of a mother and two children it is easy to see that at this moment in time each of the characters is in their own space with mother trying to cope with everything, the standing child looking elsewhere (possibly in the hope that she does not become the object of her mother's ire) and the child in the pushchair happily unaware of the tensions.

Having worked from the general to the specific (I have to confess that having studied the work of Emil Durkheim, Sociologist, I have a predisposition to see 'anomie' Durkheim's term for the isolation of the individual from the society) I then sought out examples of two general types that perhaps experience greater isolation - the elderly and those who appear 'different'.

The elderly lady pushing the trolley has space all around her and no-one pays her any interest.

Here the man in the red shirt and unusual style of dress is again isolated from those around him by the space given by others. 

When I started on this project I had no conscious intention to create the final result as shown above. I am not sure that I had a definite intention other than to see what came up as I  moved around the area taking photographs. However my pre-disposition towards the theories of Durkheim probably means that the final result was predictable.