THE WALKING CAMERA

If I look up from my desk and peer across the room, my eyes inevitably
fall on a poster of one of my favourite images by one of my favourite
photographers.  It’s Garry Winogrand’s image
two women at LAX airport walking toward what’s known as the Theme Building.  It looks like this:











In fact Winogrand is responsible for a great many of my favourite photographs.  He was, I suppose you’d say, a street
photographer, and in the course of his profession he did a lot of walking and
photographed a lot of other walkers.  He’s
usually associated with New York, but he took a lot of pictures in LA.











He even took, and even some in London. 
The received wisdom is that his London photographs weren’t as good as
his American ones, that his skill was to see a familiar environment with fresh
eyes: when confronted by an unfamiliar environment this freshness disappeared
and he was reduced to taking pictures of guardsmen or men in bowler hats.  Still, I’m very taken by the odd familiarity
and strangeness of this one, titled Woman
Entering a Cab, London.









 Winogrand did like shooting women in the street, so to speak, which in
these days of the demonized male gaze seems a dodgy activity at best, but hell
he had nothing on Miroslav Tichý.  I love Geoff Dyer’s description of Tichý’s working method,  “he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women.” Well yes
indeed.  I suppose Winogrand’s method was
less pervy because it was less sneaky, though I know there are those who’d find
this an overfine distinction.











Street photography has been much on my mind lately, having been
hunkered down with Reuel Golden’s London:
Portrait of a City, a grand photobook, showing London, its people and
inevitably its walkers.  Full disclosure: I am mentioned approvingly therein. One picture that
particularly stays with me, is the one below by Cecil Beaton, not really pervy
I suppose, since it’s obviously a set up with a model, and because the
photographer’s perviness was directed elsewhere.










I like taking pictures, I do it all the time, and I’m a good enough photographer to
know I’m not a very good photographer. But once in a while I take a photograph
that makes me happy.  Here is the best
walking I've taken in a very long time.  Garry
Winogrand, it know it ain’t.