Earlier this year I signed up and paid for a weekend of a workshop on street [photography with award winning and Magnum nominated street photographer Matt Stuart. For family health reasons my attendance was not possible but Matt & Eleonore were very kind and allowed me to join a later workshop. Rather than being at the end of June, this workshop was to take place at the start of December.
Matt Stuart
Matt Stuart is a year younger than me and I first noticed his work in a book that I bought early on in my degree called Street Photography Now by Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren. He has a terrific shot of a skip parked in front of a window poster of a peacock’s head that is perfect. It’s humorous and fortuitous of timing. Matt explains in some of his other books that he goes back and revisits scenes time and time again, the skip in this case was there for a single day only.
Other books that Matt has a hand in are Reclaim the Street, by Stephen McLaren and Matt Stuart, All That Life Can Afford, by Matt Stuart and his lovely inspirational street photography motivational script Think Like A Street Photographer.
I’ve been following Matt on instagram for a number of years, his tag is @mattu1, and I’m always impressed with the quality of his photographs, his timing, his sense of humour and his ability to get right in to the tight spaces of people filled streets, without looking like he is intimidating people as Bruce Gilden might do.
London Bound
The weekend of the workshop came about and Eléonoré and Matt had set up a Whatsapp group for us to begin communications and to help us work together over the weekend. We introduced ourselves and shared Instagram profiles so we could check each other’s work out. There were some good names in the group and where some hailed from included Iran, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Liverpool and London. Impostor syndrome was sneaking back into my consciousness and I told myself to jsut go for it. I drove down to Stanmore tube station on the Friday afternoon and after a bit of roadwork mayhem I got into the car park of the tube station at around 6:30pm. My hotel was all the way over near Kensington Olympia and I had a big rucksack of clothes, another with my cameras and my messenger bag with other stuff in it so I wa a bit weighted down. It was a faff to get to Kensington Olympia and by the time I’d made it to Shepherds Bush I’d forgotten about changing over and walked around a mile from the station up Holland Road to the little place I was to spend the next two nights in.
Checking in with the guy behind the screen it felt like a scene from a bad movie where I was hiding from the law. He sorted me out and gave me the key card then pointed me up to the first floor room number eleven. Upon entering the room I noticed that it was tiny, and there was a funny odour coming from the bathroom. Never mind, time to drop everything off and then grab the Canon 5D and 16-35mm lens to head back out into the city, also with a small film camera in my bag in case I saw anything warranting a film shot.
City Night
I headed out on the underground from Kensington Olympia into Charing Cross, via a couple of changes, and stepped out onto the street underneath Nelson’s Column. I had a good wander around here, thinking what Matt Stuart would do in my position but it didn’t help me.I tootled around Trafalgar Square then headed down to the Southbank where the buildings were all illuminated by multi-colour lights. I tried to grab a few people and their reflection in the wet pavement with a colourful background.
From here I ended up at the Southbank Centre and the skatepark underneath, there was a XMAS Skate Jam on that evening and when I got there the skaters were taking it in turns to clear a large set of stairs with a trick to try and win the best trick competition. When they landed a trick there was a siren sounding from a megaphone and if anyone broke their board they also made a loud noise too. I videoed a skater dressed as the Grinch who managed to snap his board on a heavy landing and then proceeded to thrash it until it fell apart entirely.
After this I ended up in the centre above looking at the nicely lit features in the ceiling, and had a wander around the outside, before beginning the long walk back to a tube station at Cannons Park for a journey back to Kensington Olympia.
By the time I got back it was around midnight so I put my batteries on charge, prepped my clothes and trie dto get a good sleep in a bed that was leaning to the left, so much so that I almost rolled entirely out of it in the middle of the night.
Day One Beginning
Next morning, my alarm woke me at around 7am and I started the day by getting dressed into some suitable clothes for the windy and rainy day that was awaiting us courtesy of Storm Darragh. A bried facetime with my wife and then I was on my way with my messenger bag only, holding my Leica Q3 on my wrist strap and a Leica M6 35mm film camera in the back ready to finish off the film I had begin last night. A roll of 35mm Kodak TMax P3200 black and white film, I’d shot it around a few places but I’m not sure how it will come out, we’ll see in a future post no doubt.
We were to meet at the Photographers Gallery at 10am to begin the two days of workshop, I had no idea what was coming but when I got to Oxford Street at 9:15am I ended up going for a stroll. People were already beginning to lose their umbrellas and have them inverted by the strong wind and rain. There were few people about so I had a wander all the way up to the BBC headquarters and then down to the Regent Street before popping into a JD Sports shop close by to the final destination as my little balding head was beginning to feel the cold from the rain.
Arriving at the gallery at 9:55 there appeared to be another person there awaiting someone, so I asked him if he was waiting for Matt, he replied that he was and we had a chat. His name was Majid and he is originally from Iran, but is now based in Colchester. We chatted for a short while before two more guys arrived, one was completely clad in waterproofs, even down to the bottom of his trousers providing rainproof covers for his feet. These guys, Thilo and Thomas were from Germany and had flown into the UK for this workshop only. As we continued to grow in number Matt arrived and then soon there were 11 of us and Matt. Two of our group were female and I asked whether that made it easier for them to be a street photographer and Abi said that she’d only ever been bothered by someone once, which is a good advantage to have as a street photographer.
We entered the cafe as it opened and took a seat at some pushed together tables, chatting with each other and seeing the kit that each other was using. There were a couple of Fuji shooters but the majority including Matt himself were shooting with Leicas. Mostly M11s, or Q3s but a couple of other models too. For me, owning a Leica Q3 is a special purchase of significant luxury levels but I felt that I was in a group that perhaps didn’t have that same feeling of luckiness in owning a Leica. They all seemed to be more than comfortable with this and travelling in from foreign climes, I thought I might be in the wrong company, that impostor syndrome coming back in again.
Matt stood us a coffee each and we talked about the content of the weekend and as we were draining the last dregs of coffee, Matt set us our first challenge, Based on Richard Wentworth’s “Making Do and Getting By” work we were to go out of the gallery and snap photos as a warm up exercise of items that had been repurposed in an ingenious way by people. The photos Matt gave us in the whatsapp group included:
We charged out taking loads of pictures of random items, all whislt chatting with others and gettign to know each other’s methods.
Upon returning to the front of the gallery twenty minutes later we gathered and discussed that it was a tricky exercise as there wasn’t much about. We might include some of these responses in the collection of photos that we will share tomorrow morning.
Gone Fishing
The next task to do was to head out in the wind and rain onto Oxford Street to capture people from “fishing positions”, he suggested that we stand under cover, even in bus shelters to capture images of people walking past. I stood in a stairwell of Oxford Circus tube station looking upwards, probably really annoying everyone going up and down the stairs but hey. After a while spent here I popped up and went to stand on the side of a street under cover, capturing people as they walked past.
Colour Catchers
Meeting back at Niketown in Oxford Circus we were then sent on a walk up Oxford Street with a mission to capture colour. Matt said that we should try and capture colour in our photos to make them more interesting and tie them together. So we were moving in a split up group but the people at the front were taking photos and then us at the rear were finding that the subjects were talking about why someone had just put a camera in their face. It was funny hearing the reaction to my colleagues performance 100 yards up the street.
It wasn’t easy trying to capture the colour in a meaningful way that read properly as a photograph, there were some colours that didn’t work, some shots that had colour in but were too distracting. We continued the walk up New Bond Street and a quick stop to discuss the next mission objective saw us switch over onto the Layers mission.
Layers
We were to included a foreground element in the image to ensure that there was not simply a person against a wall, as Matt suggested that this might not be the most pleasing photograph. I think he used the word Boring a lot here.
Tex Mex
We continued up New Bond Street into Soho and a little Mexican restaurant called Chilango, where most people stocked up on a trio of tacos or a burrito. Matt told us that when we get up to order, to not leave your gear unattended as there are people who keep an eye out for vulnerable situations and will easily come in and pick up cameras, phones etc if left unguarded.
We had a good chinwag in here about peoples’ motivation behind their photography and how they got into it, some were none to different from my own. There were some good stories about the places people had been and taken their cameras. After a quick drink of coke for me and some food for everyone else, we headed out back into the street.
Getting Closer
Matt gathered us around and suggested that some of our photography was a bit distant, he’d been looking at our methods and advised that we should try shooting closer to people. Matt’s method of shooting was to keep the camera up and then to sweep it to the side of the face to catch the person passing by. We practiced with each other on how to set our cameras to the 1m distance for zone focussing and to see what that looked like in the viewfinder.
Then it was time to hit Oxford Street again and get some closer shots of people. This was a challenge indeed and not easy to capture photos that close in without almost getting in the way, causing an obstruction and annoying people. With my 28mm fixed lens on the Q3 I did struggle to get close to the subjects and I know that a couple of the other workshoppers were shooting on 35mm 43mm and even a 50mm I think. Matt was shooting on a 35mm lens on his M11 so maybe the wider 28mm makes it trickier for street photography.
Gallery Guffaws
With this task complete Matt advised us that owing to the poor weather and the loss of light, it might be a good chance for the museum game. In his book Think Like A Street Photographer he calls it “Ten Points For A Pipe” in which the challenge is to look for jokes and juxtapositions. He doesn’t always use museums but with the darkness of winter setting in it was a good call. We aimed at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square but the queue for entry was immense, obviously everyone wanted out of the rain. With time being of the essence we headed around the corner and into the National Portrait Gallery where were instructed to follow people if necessary to capture some sort of a connection between a patron and a portrait.
It was nice being somewhere warm and dry so we made the most of it. I went for an amble around and ended up in front of Joshua Reynolds’ Mai painting that was a recent purchase for the Gallery at an extraordinary cost of around £50 million. Keeping an eye open for what people were wearing, their facial hair, hats, spectacles etc. I carried on through the galleries. Although I noted that many of the older paintings featured nobody wearing spectacles, which was odd to notice, even though I note that they’re a reasonably modern invention.
Pub?
Once we’d gathered back together in the foyer of the gallery we all headed out together to The Chandos pub for a drink together to discuss the day and prepare for the day to come tomorrow. A bottle of alcohol free brown ale was consumed whilst chatting with Allesandro and Steve and then I headed off to the station, via a walk down Whitehall to Westminster station. I chose to get off at the Shepherds Bush station again and entered the Westfield Shopping Centre, grabbing something to eat around 7pm and then headed back to the hotel.
Bedit Time
Once there it was time for the laptop to come out, connect to the hotel wifi, download the images of the memory card from today to select 10 images for the morning. We would not be needing the laptops in the morning as Matt had asked us to keep the chosen ten images on our phones so we could share them more easily with the group. I downloaded all of the 922 images from the day and went through them in Lightroom Classic to weed out the rubbish and then highlight the top choices for each mission we’d been set throughout the day.
With the ten images then transferred via Onedrive onto my iPhone I was able to spend a bit of time booking a slot in a Luggage Hero location for the morning in Gloucester Road to drop off my two heavy bags, enabling me to travel light for the day. It promised to be a busy day again and we were given our meeting place for 10am. I finished up on the laptop, charged all my camera batteries and then after a bit of BBC News channel I nodded off to sleep. Hopefully my clothes might be dry in the morning…..
Next Up
Join me for Day Two in the next post where we begin in Tower Hamlets and head towards the Barbican after some exercises in a flower market.
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