Setting the scene in Street photography

I am currently attending our annual national photographic congress and this year the theme is "Travel and Street Photography". I am therefore quite preoccupied with this theme and posted some articles on my personal website the past two weeks. We are also currently hosting the 3rd Africa Photographic Awards and last night we judged the "Street Photography" category. The one observation I made was that there are several people photographing graffiti but does not understand why they are including graffiti in their street photos.

Like with any photography genre, Street Photography is also about communication using your photographs. Adding graffiti to your photography make it more difficult to communicate your own message as the graffiti is already somebody else's message. You must therefore first interpret the original message and then add your own elements to the scene (people) in order to "explain" your interpretation.

Here are three photos I took in Johannesburg where I tried to add to the original artists' message-on-the-wall:

No Time for Romance

The graffiti wall is a parody of the well-known Michelangelo fresco painting "The Creation of Adam" but in this case, the spark is between a man and a woman and the woman is the stronger figure.

I saw this graffiti during an outing with the Vereeniging Photographic Society on a Sunday morning. There is a community church lower down the street so on a Sunday morning many people pass through this specific spot on their way to the church. When I saw this graffiti I immediately knew that I must use it in some way with a man and a woman in the photo. I positioned myself on the opposite side of the street and then wait for the people to pass in front of the wall.

For me, this specific photo captured some irony. The fact that the woman is walking in front of her husband checking the time while he is dragging behind with the child is showing a typical a real-life situation - the spark is gone, no romance at this moment...

You, Little People

I noticed this angry figure wearing a mask and it reminded me of the times we are living in. Times where bad news is the most important news to broadcast. We are almost on a daily basis bombarded with news about terrorists and the doings of terror organisations around the world. The tattoo on his arm looks like a bomb or a gas cylinder and even the tattoo on his fingers (NVS) further enhances his bad attitude.

I took several photos but had to wait a very long time to get a photo that I was happy with. I believe that luck is very much associated with patience and perseverance - and this photo proofed it again. Not only did the woman came from the right side (walking towards the graffiti) but just before she disappeared behind the wall, she stopped and looked at something behind the wall - exactly at the right place for my Graffiti man to point towards her.

Holy Smoke

I find it sometimes very difficult to add meaning to these graffiti walls. Over the years I have photographed many of these walls but shared only a handful - if so much. This specific piece of graffiti (called "Holy Smoke") was one of those very powerful ones that I really wanted to share. It rained the previous night so the reflection in the water was a big attraction. This pillar is at a very busy corner resulting in a constant flow of people, but none of them added value to the graffiti - in fact, adding people actually took the emphasis away from the graffiti.

After taking many photos I decided to try motion blur as a technique to add to the scene. I know many of you will say that it is unnatural to take a tripod on a street photography photo shoot, but I do do it from time-to-time. Luckily this spot was quite dark, so I managed to get a 1/20sec TV with F11 and ISO 200. With my camera set up on the tripod, I just had to wait for the correct character to walk into my frame. The second person did it - he was wearing a black hoody.

Bluring the figure and adding to that the fact that you cannot see his face makes this an anonymous figure which adds to the composition yet keep your attention at the graffiti.