I was walking around Chelsea late on a Saturday night  with my camera a few weeks ago. It is an amazing area to perambulate. Of course you feel the annoyance and amazement at the stultifying prices and wealth in the area. But it does seem like the place where no expense is spared, and you can get a weird and fascinating glimpse into the lives of people who will spend a tenner on a slice of fabulous cake, and who feel a lot better because of their postcode.

Inevitably, next to the ornate shops filled with thousand pound teapots and the devastatingly expensive bars, I found someone sleeping rough on the street. There are quite a lot of homeless sleepers around Chelsea. I once agreed with Serena that I would probably sleep round those well-heeled streets if I was in such an unfortunate situation. Not so many people on their way home from the pubs pissing on your patch. They are all too posh.

Anyway, because I was photographing everything I saw that evening I took a snap of this person. I didn’t want to disturb him so I made sure there was no flash. When I reviewed the photo later I found there was a silhouette of a figure who must have been between some car headlights and the wall at the right moment. It adds a lot to the picture, I think.

On a similar theme, I saw this anti-homeless sign in a shop selling London tourist-tat on the Strand. It seems a little cruel to stop people sleeping in front of your shop. The shop would be closed anyway, and it’s not like there would be late-night window-shoppers deterred from returning the next day to buy a London bus mug. It would not be because they saw someone sleeping by the shop window, at any rate.

The image struck me because the red of the sign reflected the red in the buses. It seemed to make a point about London.

On an entirely different note I though I would post a photo I took last night from my rooftop:

Now I think that it could be said that the picture is attractive because of the light and colours of the sunset. There is a modest element of aesthetic quality from the composition using the silhouetted buildings. But as far as I am concerned, such photos are show no skill.

If you look on all the submit-your-own flickr photo competitions, many of the submissions are of sunsets, each one as worthless as the last. Sure they look pretty. But the art of photography, I would suggest, is capturing energy (light and human) in interesting ways. A sunset essentially is a facile shortcut in the pursuit of aesthetically-pleasing light. The sun is the most fascinating and important source of light we have. Clouds and the thicker atmosphere splinter the light randomly as the sun approaches the horizon. It is beautiful to capture on film, but shows no skill. Point and click. And it will always be more beautiful in the flesh, partly because it is transitory, yet it will return, and partly because our eyes are far better at capturing the myriad wavelengths.

I think a skilful photographer finds beautiful configurations of light and situations which resonate with human emotions in places and moments we normally overlook. We don’t need photographers tell us a sunset is beautiful.

Rant over.

Posted on June 25