Street photography
According to my bio (and tags) I engage in ‘street photography', but what exactly does that entail?
I take it very liberally and shoot whatever catches my eye while walking/cycling along the road.
Wikipedia takes it a bit more seriously: Street photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic. (*)
But what if one started taking it literally and focus on road surface, signage, roadkill (yuk!), etc.?
Whether cycling or walking it is important to occasionally check the road/path/track because otherwise chances of falling/stumbling/slipping are quite possible as the conditions of those surfaces at times leave a lot to be desired.
From time to time I notice various aspects of the roads and whereas some of those are just functional, others can be surprisingly intriguing.
Something mundane like manhole or drain covers turned out to be worth having a closer look at as some featured neat patterns.
Even more surprising was noticing that there are loads of design varieties!
Plus some other road surface ‘decorations’…
I guess this resulted in my oddest blogpost until now, decide for yourself!
Last month the Bangkok Photographers Group came up with another topic, no walk at all, but ’still life’ so I submitted a few of the above…
The complete group results are here and definitely more traditional 'still life' style than my efforts:
(*) Susan Sontag came up with a more literary definition: The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque".
