For this exercise I have to chose one of the topics posted by the Street Photography Now Project in 2010 and create a small portfolio of five black & white images.
I delayed doing this exercise for some time as I thought it would be easier to complete once lockdown restrictions were lifted. As if happens my plan was somewhat thwarted by the weather which discouraged people from being out and about when I tried taking pictures for the exercise.
The topic I chose was set by Gary Anderson in week 37 of the challenge and it was Surrealism Now! I chose this topic as surrealism had been discussed in the course notes and I thought it would be a challenge as I have never tried to produce surrealist images before.
After several hours of walking around in the rain I had only captured four images that I felt were in any way surreal and I have decided to leave them as colour images as I think converting them to black and white would not enhance the quality of the images. The four I have selected are set out below.
This is one of the cows from the public art installation Cows about Cambridge 2021. I think the steampunk cow itself is quite surreal but I also like the the disinterested men in the background.
I think this is the most genuinely surreal image I captured, is it a coat for a person with three legs?
This scene struck me a quite surreal, the combination of a painted cow, planets and a NASA rocket is not something you see everyday in a shopping mall. Because of the busyness of the scene I have brought up the blues in prost-processing to make the cow and planets more prominent.
I saw this ice cream sign, which seemed somewhat out of place on a wet day, and waited unitl I had a group of people with umbrellas standing behind it. I shot wide open in order to blur the background and draw the viewer’s eye to the sign. I think this image could best be described as ironic rather than surreal, after all, wet summers are not unheard of in the UK.
I enjoyed this exercise as it definitely was a move out of my comfort zone. In the future I think I will try some of the other approaches suggested on the Street Photography Now website to try photographing in subjects and in ways that I would not normally.
Sources
Street photography Now project (2011) [Blog] At: https://streetphotographynowproject.wordpress.com/ (Accessed 22/08/2021).
Documentary, Fact & Fiction 