The first event at Fujifilm House of Photography on Saturday 2 March was followed by a photowalk through some slightly soggy Sydney streets where not a great deal was happening most likely due to the challenging weather and a major event that was about to occur in nearby Oxford Street.
Normally I’d prefer making urban documentary photographs in sunnier weather for the added benefit of expressive, sometimes surreal shadows and the dramatic play of light and shade on faces, bodies and the objects surrounding them.
It was good to get out despite the occasional drops of rain and to share the streets with some other camera-toters for a time.
Guilty as charged?
On reviewing these images I remembered something I was accused of for years, years ago, when I was living in another Australian city.
I was told more than a few times by a number of different individuals there in the city’s art world that I was guilty of casting and directing the people in my urban documentary photographs of the place in order to make them look like they are going about their business but in some kind of secret coordination.
Apparently the photographs I made were “too well designed” because “real life is just not like that” and I was “clearly pulling the strings”.
Can you imagine the sheer effort, time and control over others it would take to script, cast, direct and photograph multi-person urban documentary photographs one at a time or even more so in a series like these?
I’m lazy and would rather simply be there, be alert, be in the zone, perceive everything that is going on and then hit the shutter button at the split-second when as many elements as possible are in exactly the right place, or at least as close to it as possible.
Image notes
I made these photographs with a Fujifilm X-Pro2 and Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R then processed the raw files in DxO PhotoLab 6 Elite with DxO FilmPack Elite 6 and DxO ViewPoint 4 as plug-ins using the Kodak Portra 160VC film simulation preset and DxO’s excellent DeepPrime XD, exporting the photographs as 2048px-wide JPEGs.
- B&H – Fujifilm
- DxO – Web site – DxO’s software will be updated to support Fujifilm’s X100VI sometime in May 2024.
- Fujifilm X Global – Web site
- Iridient Digital – Web site – Iridient Developer 4.2.1 was released on 21 February 2024 and Iridient Transformer 3.2 was released on 4 March 2024. Both support the Fujifilm X100VI.
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