I love street photography – capturing the moment, a glance, a split second in the life of someone – frozen in time.

As much as it’s not what I choose to do myself, I have my own tastes in photography that maybe don’t quite match what I shoot myself. But I believe that they all share the same purpose: to inspire and guide me in doing what I do.

Image © Ruth Orkin - Iraqui Jewish Refugees, Lydda Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1951

So it is, that I’d like to introduce you to Ruth Orkin’s work. Ruth was a member of New York’s Photo League. Perhaps her most famous image is that of the ‘American Girl in Italy’. Whilst there on a holiday with one of her friends, they decided to make photographs of what it was like for a single woman traveling around.

I do love street photography. It’s a very different form of photography from Landscape work. I find that although there is perhaps less of an aesthetic in the work, there is often more of a story involved, and I find that I look at street photographs in a much more different way than I do landscapes. I think I often feel transported back in time and find it really interesting to see the interaction between subjects. I often marvel at the timing in making the right shot (although for me, Henri Cartier Bresson’s work is less engaging).

I often wonder, who were these people? What were their lives like? I love how photography can document something, freeze it in time.

Anyway, Ruth’s work is really worth checking out and I see there is an excellent web site about her work which will give you plenty to enjoy.

Currently, there are no publications available about her work and I’ve had to rely on buying used copies. In particular, I bought ‘Above And Beyond’ by Ruth. It’s a small, slim paper back, but the images in it are really excellent. It was unfortunately, a bit expensive, but when I get ‘into something’, I usually seem to find that money just doesn’t matter that much…  (ahem). I’m just very curious as to why there has been nothing published about her in book form for some time?

I came across a really interesting site today (petapixel.com) which has some great TED video’s on it.

When I was in Patagonia several years ago, a couple (hi Mary & Chris) on my workshop kindly sent me a coffee table book of the works of Edward Burtynsky.

I’d never heard of him before, but his work I feel, is very compelling.

Photography should know no bounds. It’s easy to classify things into ‘landscape’, ‘portraiture’, etc, etc, but as one moves on through photography, we hear and learn about photographers who are doing astonishing things.

A few posts ago, I was discussing ‘voice’, that part of you which governs your style and how you move forward with your photography. Watching this vide of Burtynsky, it’s clear he has a very strong motivation for why he makes his images. He’s very defined. He’s not out there shooting coastal sea scapes (sorry, but this is perhaps a dig of mine at the countless web sites I see which just seem to feature water in every shot). He’s got direction and focus.

His images are pretty inspiring and they remind me that so long as you have a strong sense of what it is you want to do, the photography will flourish.

What I love about this clip of Ansel, apart from how modest he is, and seems like a really easy going chap, is how open he is about his art.

He explains how he manipulated his images in his dark room, and how he liked to ‘visualise’ the scene before he took it. Essentially, the negative for Ansel was the starting point in creating his ‘visions’, and to look at the negative printed verbatim would have been an uninspiring experience. He coined the phrase ‘the negative is the score, and the print is the performance’.

Now what gets me is that there are a load of folk out there who think manipulation of the image is lying. And that it’s a relatively new thing since the digital revolution came along, but If you listen to Ansel, you’ll realise that manipulation of the image has always been there, and it’s part of the creative process of photography. Sure I love it when an image comes together that requires no alterations, but I do like to put my own ‘art’ into my work, as do many photographers.

Ansel was very forward thinking and he embraced the (at the time) forthcoming digital revolution. He thought it was exciting and it would lead to new possibilities. He was a purist in the artistic sense and was no dictator of what should and should not be acceptible as art.