How I Turn My Street Photography Into Art #3

Welcome to my series where I talk about the stories behind my fine art photography pieces.

The ‘How I Turn My Street Photography Into Art’ Series

Welcome to my series where I tell the story behind some of my fine art photography pieces. I hope to convey to photographers that street photography is a great source for creating art. If you’re like me and love the visual arts but lack any talent to paint or draw, photography has become my artistic surrogate that allows me to create whenever I desire. That’s because my companion passion is street photography and I’ve literally thousands of images to choose from to create fine art photography pieces, and with and with any luck, I’ll be producing works of art for years to come.

For the second entry in my How I Turn My Street Photography Into Art, I’ll talk about the story behind “ICM #80”.

The Story Behind ICM #80

I’ve shifted the focus of my photography this year to shooting ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) and abstract photography. It’s not that I’ve grown tired of street photography - this kind of work is still street photography to me - but I realize that if I’m to make a career out of selling fine art prints then my work should actually look like fine art as opposed to “regular photos” that look like something out of Time Life. Naturally, I think this viewpoint is wrong. Street photography should be viewed by the masses as fine art and worthy of putting up on walls. But there aren’t a lot of people that do. Let me rephrase that: there aren’t a lot of serious art buyers that do.

Even my printer said as much in passing: "Of course, this viewpoint is wrong.” I’d been waiting with him in his office as one of his assistants was printing a sample canvas print for me. "Whatever you do,” he went on to say, “don’t stop doing street photography.”

I wasn’t quick enough on my toes that afternoon to inform him that my collection methods with my camera in the field was still very much street photography, it was only in the final results that the mysterious transition of ‘mere photo’ to ‘art’ took place. What he probably meant to say was, don’t forget to keep it real, as in, keep shooting traditional street photography. Which of course, I won’t. Not in India, at least.

As for the above image…the one that looks terribly composed. This is directly out of camera, by the way, the result of an ICM shot taken at 1/4 of a second with my 85mm lens. It was part of a series of shots of the same scene when I jiggled the camera up and down. Using this method is always a crap shoot and crap is the key word. Less than one percent of these images ever make it to market, as the saying goes. That’s because obtaining just the right look, one that looks painterly, is difficult to pull off. The above Raw image does look painterly. Which is why I selected it for editing and experimentation to see if it could be transformed into something beautiful.

On this particular day, I’d been shooting at Aksa Beach, in Malad where I live, a northern Mumbai suburb. It was a difficult shoot with the heat and humidity. To top it off, I was getting more than the usual attention from the locals, who approached me in small groups. Add a drunken man into the mix, who repeatedly came out of the water, leaving his wife and kids to splash around alone, to proclaim some new kind of bullshit statement, and it makes for a challenging situation. I ended up walking away from that situation after he conned some poor kids who had a phone to call someone for him.

Shooting ICM is still a very street photography experience!

As for the post-production side of things, my process for making ICM images has been constant. When I get home, I upload and view all the shots in Lightroom. On this particular day, there were 1,200+ shots to cull. I narrowed it down to a few dozen for possible editing, including images that I wouldn’t normally select because maybe there was a small element I wanted to experiment with. This was one such image. I wanted to see if I could isolate the girl drinking water and try to pull out the details in the Raw file. All of this happens in Photoshop with possibly the help of third-party plugins.

I’m quite happy with the results. I want to do more work like this but closer up with my subjects. The reason why the 85mm lens works so well for beach work is that I’m able to keep a relatively safe distance from the water so I don’t get my gear wet. And since shooting ICM is such a grueling process that involves taking multiple shots of every scene, I don’t like to overstay my welcome because I don’t want my subjects to become weary of my presence and change their behavior. So far, so good.