How many pictures of people in the street can one take? – Many.

Gary Winogrand, the famous American street photographer used to shoot several hours a day.  When he died,  he left several million negatives, several thousand of which not yet developed, and that was long before the invention of digital and 12fps cameras.

At a certain point though, anybody will get tired with typical poses and straight verticals. You need to animate the scene somewhat. Wide angle lenses and instinctive framing create some dynamism and more unexpected points of view.

I’ve noticed, that you can use the verticals to your advantage, also when you want to convey an alternative notion of mass, with people climbing with difficulty or rolling down with ease.

If you spot kids playing, they look ready to fly.

The liberated diagonals can quickly become a canon in their own way, and start looking like a classic. Unlike free jazz or modern paintings, they still retain order and structure. Perhaps it would take a collage, photo montage or simply a Photo Shop manipulation to deprive a photograph completely of its original substance.  I prefer to work on what I can obtain on the negative through experimentation with lenses, framing and exposure techniques.

“It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing”