I got into street photography back in 2006 when I was working on cruise ships. I was traveling to some of the most amazing destinations in the world and I wanted to document what I was seeing. My girlfriend at the time, bought me the Canon XTi as a gift. It was the first legit camera I ever owned. Back then, I gravitated to people and all the random things that happened on the street. People at markets, interesting shadows, graffiti and anything I thought would photograph well.
Me in the Venice, Italy canals. 2007
YouTube and Instagram in the past few years has been inundated with a new generation of street photographers. Many of them have been highly influenced by the same five to ten famous street photographers. Winogrand, Frank, Cartier-Bresson, Web, Gilden and list of many more. And that’s fine. We’ve all been influenced by someone. However, when I started shooting “street” in 2006, before IG and before "first person YouTube street vlogs’, I was only influenced by the handful of times that maybe I saw a street photo somewhere. I wasn’t yet buying photo books, I didn’t have IG as a way to see the latest trends, gear or techniques. I only had real life in front of me to inspire me. Flickr was hot at the time but I probably didn’t get an account until about 2008.
Looking back on it, the work wasn’t very good but it wanted to be great. I guess Ira Glass was right about your early work hasn’t caught up to your taste.
That definitely didn’t keep me from shooting. Every new port I visited was an opportunity for me to get better. A lot of the photos turned out to be just really bad tourist photos but at the time, I thought I was print publication bound.
I’m glad I still have all the photos from back then. One, for memory sake and secondly, to see how far I’ve come since then. In some ways, my aesthetic hasn’t changed. I won’t wax poetic about the history of street photography and all the lesson I’ve learned since but I did want to share my earliest street photos.
