Cities present a daunting challenge to anyone holding a camera. On the surface, the plethora of subjects makes for easy work, but when you're faced with a town square, or a busy bar, the abundance of choice serves only to overwhelm.
In an effort to fight this feeling, I began by taking photographs with as little noise as possible. My goal was to rise above, and give something that is in short supply in a metropolis - peace. New york is no exception, but still, standing at the end of a pier, with a clear sky and a full view of that iconic file of buildings that locals are only too happy to name, I glimmered a moment of calm.
Doing so felt more familiar to me. My time spent taking photographs of landscapes has given me an acute eye for the characteristics of a photograph that conspire to create contentment. In doing so, I sought to capture motion, and in some meagre sense action, without sacrificing that sense of safe observation. New York's Hudson river offered just the setting.
The use of the railing on the side of the boat adds depth to the shot, in what photographers call "framing", and I call "something that looks cool". It was about here that I began to realise that my search for peace was, perhaps, foolish. I read some years ago that contentment is feeling happiness, and accepting that it won't last forever, and feeling sorrow without pleading with it to dissipate. So my search for a peaceful moment in the city was misguided, and it was time that I took a different tact.
That said, I had to take just one more.
Abandoning Peace.
I have just a few shots from this new philosophy that I am happy with. All of the others seem amateur and lazy, too messy and so full of details as to provide no strong subject or tell no story. Berlin is an incredible city, and I imagine to a more trained eye, the opportunities are endless. Alas for me, it proved distracting, and it led to moments of forcing the subject, picking something purely because it stands out, in a desperate attempt to salvage coherence from chaos.
So I stopped looking for subjects. Go with my gut. Take pictures that might be cool. Alas, my gut isn't a particularly talented photographer, and I found that every moment I captured was flat, devoid of the kind of activity and story needed to reciprocate the advances of a viewer.
Finally, I took a different approach. Stop overthinking, but don't abandon thought. I began in New Jersey, where I sat in a bar in Hoboken, had a beer and stared out at streets lined with all manner of people, invariably rushing this way and that, and that's when things started to click.
This was my first photograph in a city that came naturally, and incidentally, is also one of my favourites. I made no attempt at keeping things "clean". The sign on the window of the bar overlaps with the subject, and the scene is busy, but interestingly, I don't find it to be cluttered. There is a clear story, the subjects stand on their own, with no forced editing or photography needed. In short, I captured a scene, and that was my new mission.
Even in quieter moments, there is always a story to find. Cities are collections of stories, changing, coalescing, manifesting, and ending. This realisation was important for me. The noise of a city is like a room of musicians, each practicing their own composition. Taken in its entirety, it is a mess of sounds with no coherence, but it doesn't change the beauty of the individual melody. As my nephew might tell me, my dislike of cities is a "skill issue". I was, for lack of a better phrase, listening wrong.
When I started to look for stories, even busy photographs seem to come together. I greatly enjoyed this moment in Zurich. The movement gives the scene a sense of action and activity, but the relaxed smiles of the patrons bring with it a kind of contentment. The kind of disconnected peace one experiences by looking out onto the street and seeing the city race in front of you.
Rather than trying to capture beauty, a scene can be ugly. Like rubbish, both neatly packaged and carelessly discarded beside a busy London street. There is a story here, of the city exhaling and slowing down (yet never ceasing) for the night.
And when I found that it was time to return to wider shots, I stopped trying to disconnect from the busy signs and crowds of the city, and saw them for what they are. The intricacies and details that make a thing beautiful.
