Bill Lytton

Whenever I look online for information or advice relating to street photography, Eric Kim’s name regularly surfaces. I’ve been reading his blog for a couple of years and in that time; I’ve watched his career and online prominence grow.

In comparison to other areas of photography, there’s relatively little advice online about street photography. But a number of photographers like Eric are helping to tackle this problem as well as build a solid and much-needed community for street photographers.

In all art forms; music, writing, architecture, photography, whatever; originality and innovation are the things that produce the best works from the best artists. A lot of advice on how to improve your art focusses on technical and technological aspects; often with a cursory “develop your own style” thrown in somewhere. It’s a difficult thing to explain or teach: how do you develop your vision or style? And how do you know if you’ve found it?

The western world was sent into a brief paranoid frenzy when whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked government information about the surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA). I say brief, because it seems to have been forgotten by a large number of people; it seemed like it was just more news. The revelations, and more that followed, showed how the NSA record phone calls and data and more controversially; that they use information from emails and social networking sites.

We recently published an article about She & Him enacting an anti-photo policy at a gig. Signs were posted saying “At the request of Matt [Ward] and Zooey [Deschanel], we ask that people not use their cell phones to take pictures and video, but instead enjoy the show they have put together in 3D”.

It reminded me of a story my Father told me about a Frank Zappa concert. Apparently, people were given opaque-lens glasses at the request of Zappa and the band so that, audience-members could more fully experience the music without any visual distractions.

I first heard of Jim Mortram and his project ‘Small Town Inertia’ in the ‘Ones to Watch’ section of the British Journal of Photography. At first, I was happy that someone from my homeland, Norfolk, was making an impact in the photographic world. But of all projects I’d seen in BJP, Small Town Inertia was the only that gripped me.

This little story started after I’d bought a Ricoh GRD IV and GV-2 viewfinder. Due to some unforeseen financial issues, I realized I had to sell it. I didn’t think this would be a problem since I’d only used it around three or four times. So optimistically, I went about advertising on eBay, Gumtree and Craigslist. The next day I received an email via the Craigslist ad from ‘Pamela Richard’ asking for me to reply “asap”. This is where it all began.

A while back, PetaPixel posted some features about image averaging and faces. Richard Prince created a composite portrait of the 57 faces of girlfriends on Seinfeld. This led to Pat David exploring the averaging of faces with Martin Schoeller’s portraits of celebrities.

I’ve long been interested in image averaging as well; as a measure of central tendency, I like that image averaging can highlight similarities and differences across an array of seemingly equivalent images.

How well do you know the area in which you live? Or any area you regularly visit, for that matter? This may seem like the question of an idiot -- of course you know your area of residence -- but do you really? Have you explored every road and back road and high street and side street and pathway and alleyway? I’m aware I strayed into polysyndeton, but it’s relevant to the question I’m asking: how well do you know the area in which you live?