
BusHead
24Nov21
[12Apr23] I concluded in a 2019 degree exercise that I do not approve of candid street photography and that "It is furtive and patronising and tends to be condescending in effect even if not so in intention (which brings us back to Emily Thornberry in Rochester)", 2019.
But I have a compromise. A compromise is necessary because photographs of people are endlessly fascinating and, to some extent at least, if you're not photographing people then you're a photographer with a hand tied behind their back.
The compromise is that I photograph people from behind, so as not to disclose their identity and usually while travelling on a bus, a purely tactical decision because I am not sufficiently mobile and agile to respond to moving targets.
Hence BusHeads.
The backs of heads are still fascinating because they engender more speculation than the facial portrait which gives too much away in terms of initial judgments.
Here are some examples, the earliest in the series, selected but not yet processed — I have not given much thought yet to how much processing to apply: the only processed image so far is the example above, auto-corrected in Camera Raw Filter but not straightened as that discards too much of the image. I imagine that will be the general approach, though straightening and cropping will be needed sometimes.







Batch 1 - Draft