Exercise: Busy traffic

What I'm trying to do here is show the 'busyness' of a place.It's taken some time to find a place where I could capture this but finally I tried the exercise out at Tate Modern last weekend.

P998: F10 @ 1/5  43mm  1/13

I spent some time watching how Tate visitors moved around this space on Level 3 and found it quite difficult to capture what was happening.Looking down from the stairway didn't offer any solution so in the end I held my camera at waist level using live view to try and angle the shots to capture movement and fired off a number of shots. P998 and P999 came out the best. While not that well focused, the blurred figures in P998 give a sense of movement and the image shows different activities going on. Though the empty space in the middle suggest a crowd that has just left! P999 below looks more busy with a slight blurring of some figures suggesting movement -again some variety of activities.

P999: F10  @ 1/13  43mm  ISO 800

So, not entirely happy with the two images above I decide to look at what was happening outside the Tate. The embankment can be very crowded with Tate visitors having a break, passers-by and street performers and this can best be seen from the outside balcony on Level 3.

P1000: F10 @ 1/800  ISO 1600

Again I spent some time watching people around the musician ( P1000) and further along P1001). Taking images from above does help convey the sense of busyness but getting a good composition is tricky dependent as it is on a number of factors i.e. camera position, crowd movement and the range of activities showing how  the space is being used, its function.

 

PF1001  @ 1/640  106mm  ISO 1600

Shirley Baker exhibition

Shirley Baker: Women, children and loitering men

I really enjoyed this exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery. It presents the pioneering work of British photographer Shirley Baker (1932 -2014), concentrating on a period of her career which came to define her rather distinctive vision. 

Shirley Baker,Manchester,1964 ©Shirley Baker Trust

During the 1960s and 1980s she captured the gradual destruction of the terraces of inner city Salford and Manchester and their replacement by high rise flats. With these changes came a dispersal of urban communities,significantly impacting on the people whose lives spilt out on to the streets where they lived - changes quietly observed by Baker. 

 

Shirley Baker,Manchester,1967 ©Shirley Baker Trust

Her photographs are a mix of black and white and colour ( a brief foray into colour apparently ). Interestingly, I found that the colour ones had more of a sense of place and time than the black and white ones - they resonate more.The black and white ones could be said to have a certain timelessness - many could have been taken in the 1930s. 

 

Shirley Baker,Hulme,July,1965 ©Shirley Baker Trust

You can see an empathetic but very unsentimental approach in her work. As she became a familiar sight to families living in these terraces, she became an instant attraction for the local children who loved having their photos taken. Looking at her pictures you can see her real skill in getting the shot before the children started ‘posing’. I wonder too whether being constantly around these families engendered a sense of trust or maybe a being part of the ‘wallpaper’ that provided her with the opportunity to take these often striking mages.

Shirley Baker, Manchester,1968 ©Shirley Baker Trust

Having lived as a student in inner city Manchester in the early 1970s when streets were being bulldozed around our own terrace, I found these images memorable not only for the personal memories they evoked but for the quality of Baker’s observation and composition. 

The exhibition also draws on ephemera, contact sheets, sketches and an interview with the exhibition’s curator, Anna Douglas.  All of this adds to the experience.