Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
Q: What is the difference between someone you know and a stranger?
A: A stranger makes no attempt to hide what they are feeling.
Some snatched street portraits this week. All the subjects featured seem to be weighed down with their own thoughts. Or rather they are just not concealing their weariness or unhappiness as they do not feel anyone is looking. If we become aware we are being observed we will do our best to conceal what we are thinking. The irony is that our guard is up more in private with those we know than in public with those who we don’t. Surrounded by an endless sea of strangers, we make no effort to put our ‘face’ on. These photographs for me represent the face behind the face. The one people don’t want you to see. But if we are all doing the same thing, why hide it?
We live in an era where so many photographs presented in the digital domain feature fake smiles. An endless stream of selfies featuring nothing but artificial moments fabricated for the camera. You cannot trust a presentation of happiness that has been constructed for consumption. So is misery ultimately more truthful than happiness? People rarely fake being miserable, not in photographs at any rate, so maybe you can trust misery more as the default position of the human condition. The truth is both are moods and states of mind that we experience on a regular basis, the real difference is that we try to hide one but project the other.