Photographing Like a Tourist in my Home City
A Re-Introduction to Street Photography
I think I’ve told the story of how I started photographing before. It was taking photos of people ducking for cover under St George’s Walk, Croydon, and of interesting front doors and fence panels that I walked past. That’s how I learned the ins and outs of my camera, anyway. Not long after, documenting my surroundings became a distant habit.
Predominantly, I work in commercial portrait photography and live music photography. Those genres are my bread and butter, and I do, really and truly, love photographing people and love photographing events, but I’ve recently been reminded that my first love in photography wasn’t documenting the energy in a club or photographing a model with interesting facial features and a great dress sense. Those things grew to become loves of mine, but my first true love was street photography.
Over the years, my love for street photography has been trying to fight its way out, but I seem to only allow it to do so when I’m in a city that’s not mine.
I fall in love with cities quickly. Documenting those cities with my camera doesn’t help slow that process down. I spend a week in a new city and I convince myself that yes, this city should be my new home. This city will solve my problems, will lead me to live a slower, more brilliant life. This city is what I need.
Of course, romanticising places that I don’t live in is not the answer to all of my problems. The reason that I can picture myself slow living in these cities, hopping from coffee shop to coffee shop, engaging in art all day long, is because I’m on holiday. The practical side of my brain understands that, my imagination, however, runs away with other ideas.
This year, I’ve set myself a challenge to allow myself the grace to take photos in the city I live in and the city I’m from. For context, I grew up around Croydon (South London), but I moved to Manchester in 2017. The nature of my job as a freelance photographer, however, means that I still spend a lot of time in London. So, the challenge is to document Manchester and London more often, and try to look at those cities as though I’m a tourist in them.
Of course, this is easier said than done.
The beauty of being a tourist, of exploring a city that you don’t usually frequent, is that everything is new and bright and beautiful. It’s easy to notice the great things, the hidden corners and the photos you want to take.
When a place becomes your everyday, your normal, your routine, however, finding the beauty in the ordinary becomes much more difficult. That’s the challenge. The challenge is participating in your everyday walk but noticing something new; it’s looking out of the window for the 70th time that day and allowing yourself to watch, this time; it’s slowing down the pace and reminding yourself that this place has beauty, too.
So far, the challenge has led me to enjoy London in a way that I don’t think I ever have before. London is a really big place, and so, partly, I’m cheating. I’m going to places that I didn’t always spend a lot of time in anyway, and so that’s easier to find new things. But I’m also frequenting places that I’ve spent a lot of time, over the years, to try and find that balance between slowing down in a place that you know so well, but also finding excitement in the places that maybe I never took notice of before.
Manchester is a much smaller city. In some ways, that makes it easier. There’s less choice, less decision, about where my walks take me, and I almost always carry a small point and shoot to allow myself to partake in this challenge, now. On the other hand, you have to force yourself to notice new things when you’re sitting at the same tram stop you’ve been sitting at every week for the last seven years.
The great thing about this challenge is that it’s never-ending. There will always be new things to notice and new stories to tell, and so this challenge can transform into an everyday practice that will either improve my skills as a photographer or force me to appreciate my surroundings more, or maybe, if I’m really lucky, a bit of both.
Soon, I’ll be releasing a large body of work that I’ve photographed over the last year in London on my YouTube channel. If you’re interested in seeing more of my street photography work, that’s probably where you’ll be able to find it. But, for now, I’ll leave you with a few shots that I’ve taken across London & Manchester.
Definitely the post I needed right now. I can absolutely relate to so much of what you said. I was just talking about this with another substacker this week, as it’s an issue I’m also constantly facing, being from a small city. Between his and your advice, I’ve got a lot to build off to make photography here a bit more enticing.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately — photographing my home neighborhood as if I’m a tourist on vacation with eyes wide open. Your post is great inspiration to go out and do it! Beautiful images — especially love the grocery store one 🍎