Spectral Presents

For the longest time, I struggled to take pictures of people. The problem was never technical: I knew how to set up a speed-light, I knew how to take a portrait, and I knew how to re-touch an image. The problem was that while I could produce a technically proficient portrait, the resulting images did absolutely nothing for me on an artistic level.

For ages, this form of photographic misanthropy drove me to landscape photography. I would pick up my tripod, go somewhere interesting, and produce image after image that was utterly devoid of human life. 

If future archaeologists were to comb through the wreckage of post-Brexit Britain and find only my lightroom catalogue they would probably assume that I was the last human left alive on this cursed island; a lone figure doomed to crawl across a post-apocalyptic wasteland and compelled to catalogue the remains of a civilisation that had long-since torn itself asunder.

I then discovered the work of Saul Leiter, a member of the New York school of photography who shared that group’s commitment to presenting the streets of Manhattan as a whirling vortex of human activity. However, while many New York photographers of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s emphasised the raw individualism of their human subjects, Leiter tended to use complex compositional techniques involving mirrors, reflections, and foreground framing to present his subjects as fragile and surrounded by these structures which, though invisible to the subjects themselves, were revealed by the photographer’s eye.

This vision of humanity as something fragile and surrounded by inhuman structures speaks to the anarchist within me. What started as an attempt to re-create some of Leiter’s compositional techniques soon became a way of photographing people in a way that mirrored how I felt about them and their fleeting presence in my life. 

These are the strangers, the people we do not know. They are the people who share our physical presence while their faces remain shrouded by unfamiliarity. Those whose lives intersect our own as they move from one unknown place to another, their motivations and ambitions determined by structures and contexts that will forever remain alien and unknown. These are the drifts of ghosts we pass through when we go shopping, the spectral presences who share our train carriages on the long commute home. These are the people who were absent from our lives during lockdown but are now impossible to escape.