The spirit of travelling

It has been somewhere close to 5 years now since the last time that I’ve picked up the camera and left the front door for the sole purpose of taking photographs on the street. In between COVID, and the 3 years before that, I had uprooted myself from the big city lifestyle and was located in various parts of regional Australia — the types of places where there were not a lot of streets to photograph. Now that I am back in close proximity to the fast moving and high energy urban environment of Melbourne, there are few excuses to not reconnect with street photography again.

I have been reacquainting myself with the Fujifilm X-Pro1 that I had acquired years ago, and you can bet that there have been days when the question of, ‘Why bother?!’ surfaces while lugging around all the metal and glass.

Even though we live in a time where the supercomputers in our pockets are more than capable of taking a photograph and capturing a scene, there seems to be a different mentality that one has to adopt when walking around with a machine that is wholeheartedly designed for a singular purpose.

“In Pursuit of Perfection.

When you want to reach for the sky, you need to start with the basics. The certainty you feel with your fingertips as you look through the viewfinder. You feel connected to the camera, you focus on the moment and shoot the ultimate photo.”

- Fujifilm brochure, 2016

What is street photography, anyways? Maybe that is a good place to start in this exploration, even though condensing and describing this particular process with words would make it seem quite mundane. I would describe street photography as the activity of taking photographs on the streets, typically within urban locations and where the subject matter is fairly broad and imprecise. The core essence of this style is in immersing oneself into a dynamic and unpredictable environment — where people float in and out of the scene, where the lighting and weather is constantly changing and where a subject that appears interesting at a particular moment may be completely ordinary in the next, or more likely, to not be there at all.

This chaos is actually where the magic of street photography sparks. A juxtaposition to street would be a discipline like studio portraiture. In such an environment, perfection comes as a result of all the variables being tamed and dialled in. Lighting, subject matter, shutter speed, what the scene actually looks like and other such factors can be made predictable. In street, perfection relies more on being at the right place at the right time, and being the right person to be observant enough to realise that a scene exists in the first place.

Someone who is deeply experienced in street photography might read all of this and cringe immensely, and that’s to be expected. I am no expert by any means, with my journey starting off as a naïve practitioner and have continued to be largely self-taught. My first street camera was a Fujifilm X100 (no, I was never cool or sophisticated enough for film photography) and all I would do during the spare time I had as an engineering undergrad student would be to make a deliberate pitstop during the commute home and spend a few hours walking on the streets of Perth. My favourite time of day was the afternoon rush, because it meant that the lighting would be particularly nice and also because the streets would be most packed with people and activity.

During these earliest chapters, the streets became the training ground for me to educate myself on what photography even means — a training ground that was completely accessible to a student with limited financial means. All I had to do was to show up with my camera and to be curious for what could unfold on any particular day.

I use the words of ‘could unfold’ because street photography, as alluded to earlier, is mostly chaotic and there are more days of capturing absolutely nothing than there are of capturing something meaningful.

One of the first lessons that street photography had revealed to me was how important first impressions are, which I had realised through observing how intimidated people were to seeing someone carrying a camera on their person. There were particular instances where people who were walking towards me on the same side of the street that I was on would often jump across the road to the other side the moment they noticed that I was carrying a camera. Having equipment with a discrete and novel form factor did help in easing this, but largely it has become something that I have acclimatised to over time.

As much as people were intimidated by the fact that I was walking around with a camera, I was initially extremely nervous about the process of taking photographs of strangers on the street. They were intimidated by me, sure, but I was more intimidated by them! By some miracle, there was something that clicked early on that kept me going and progressing through what I had found to be a highly unnatural and scary process — which was the full body-and-mind intensity of capturing interesting fragments of time through the lens of a camera. The fear of judgement was made secondary to this overarching curiosity and any discomfort that I might have been causing through the process of doing the work was in service of making something interesting.

Then, what does it mean to do street photography well? A trap that I had fell into early on was to tie the quality of a street photography experience to a particular quantitative output — to say to myself, “I want to achieve such-and-such photograph by the end of the day.” This, as it turns out, is extremely counter current to the nature of the streets — to expect predictability from an environment that is inherently chaotic is to set oneself up for failure from the get go.

Over time, I have learnt to channel the excitement and energy behind setting high expectations towards the practice of being present in the environment as the most important thing. Doing good work now involved dedicating one’s full body and mind into the thing at hand. Objective outcomes flow downstream from this mentality, and not the other way around.

This sense of openness-to-unpredictability within street photography is very alike to the open mindset that travelling to unfamiliar places demands from a person. The focus, not on fulfilling preconceived expectations, but to discover the place, its sights and its people for what it actually is, rather than seeking for what one expects from it. To hope to achieve some specific shot on the streets would be akin to being in Japan and wishing to eat cereal for breakfast, instead of being malleable and immersing oneself in the local customs of having a savoury bowl of udon noodles or steamed rice with grilled mackerel. To be too rigid in one’s expectations would be to set oneself up for disappointment and unnecessary frustration.

To expect, the most you will get is the level of your expectations. And more often than not we live too safe and expect too little. To not expect, you open your being to the full spectrum of what the environment can offer you, most of which will exceed your wildest expectations.

“Indeed, if you set off down the road with specific agendas and goals, you will at best discover the pleasure of actualising them. But if you wander with open eyes and simple curiosity, you’ll discover a much richer pleasure — the simple feeling of possibility that hums from every direction as you move from place to place.”

— Rolf Potts