Pinhole Experiments

Zero 2000 6x6. Fomapan ISO 200 f138 at 19 seconds. ©Stewart Weir 2012

Urban Shoots

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” – Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt is the master of street photography and for any aspiring street photographer I think his wisdom sums up the the way of thinking required for successful images.

Street photography is tough and requires a huge amount of dedication and even more perseverance to walk the streets for many hours in ‘the zone’. Digital Photographer magazine gave me a challenge unusually putting me up against New York photographer James Maher to shoot a set of images based on several themes. A street photography shoot out with nothing but my reputation hanging by a few thousands of second! I don’t consider myself as a specialist street photographer so I was up for the challenge. For the assignment I decided to work in colour and not my preferred choice which is black and white. Also, the fact that New York is a far sexier place to photograph than Sussex by the sea was a worry!

I must say it was one of the toughest assignments Ive done but only because I was shooting in my home town. This assignment taught me a valuable lesson.. I assumed it was going to be easier than the reality. It’s surprisingly easy when shooting abroad or even in another British city but I’m so familiar with every nook and cranny of Brighton that a kind of photographers block fell onto me and instead of taking a day or two to shoot it took a week. Maybe it was paralysis by analysis or maybe it was panic as the days went by but my creative dead calm of nothingness was in hindsight a great lesson.

I wasn’t ‘seeing’ and more to the point not feeling ‘it’. Now when I say ‘it’ I’m referring to the meditation of shooting. It’s the sixth sense trust of your intuition and the connection felt with what your observing as you untangle life between your brain, eye, the camera and life.

The more I couldn’t feel ‘it’ the more stressed I felt. Perseverance forced me to walk a lot of miles and certainly more miles than was necessary. After three days of nothing I started to ‘see’ again. With 2 days before the deadline I had only one image out of five I was happy with. The last two days were spent out from early morning until the sun went down. I got the images I wanted in the end. To me each of the five images represents a battle with myself where no battle was necessary!

Does pressure enhance creativity or is it like being slapped around the face with a cold Haddock at four o’clock in the morning? There is only one pressure and it’s what you put on yourself. My arrogance and assuming it was going to be easy was my downfall but it’s a great lesson and I must say the shoot was one of my most enjoyable for some time but only because I worked through my first ever creative dead calm and delivered a set of images I was happy with on time. Not delivering the shoot to the picture editor on time is potential career suicide. Voting begins on the Digital Photographer website Thursday 29th December.

Image Themes .. City Pride, Life On The Streets, People and Signs, Reflections.

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Afghanistan Street Portraits

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed” – Dwight D Eisenhower

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Herat and surrounding areas shortly after the fall of the Taliban, January 2002

New York Thanksgiving 2004

New York ©Stewart Weir 2004

Connemara Horses

Ireland ©Stewart Weir 1998

Manhattan Deli

New York ©Stewart Weir 2004

Karoshi

Karoshi is the name given to death caused by to much work. There is a national Japanese karoshi hotline, a karoshi self-help book and a law that funnels money to the widow and children of a salaryman who works himself into an early karoshi for the good of his company.

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For decades, the Japanese government has been trying, and largely failing, to set limits on work and on overtime. The problem of karoshi became prevalent enough to warrant its own word in the boom years of the late 1970s, as the number of Japanese men working more than 60 hours a week soared. Thirty years later, overtime rules remain so nebulous and so weakly enforced that the United Nations’ International Labor Organization has described Japan as a country with no legal limits on the practice. The consequences show up not only in claims for death and disability from overwork but in suicides attributed to “fatigue from work.”

December

Brighton Beach © Stewart Weir 2010

Brighton Beach

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” – Susan Sontag

Brighton Beach next to the Pier © Stewart Weir 2005

English Football Culture

A Brighton & Hove Albion football fan at Torquay United 1st January 1997. © Stewart Weir 1997

Prior to the beginning of Brighton & Hove Albion football club’s 1995/96 season I was asked to produce the action images for the club programme. In July 95′ I approached the club about the idea to produce a behind the scenes photo documentary about the club and the answer was yes.

I began documenting behind the scenes events within the club’s home The Goldstone Ground, on the training pitch and at home and away games. Within weeks of starting the photo documentary the club fell into a crisis both on and off the pitch. I was eventually banned from entering the ground but still managed to get into every game with the help of the club’s staff who were against their tyrannical employers.

The story that evolved over 2 seasons from 1995 to 1997 was beyond anything Hollywood could have dreamed up. I was lucky enough to fall into a story and document it in a way that had never been done before about an English football club. A book called More Than Ninety Minutes resulted and a series of exhibitions throughout the UK. I’m presently looking at the idea of doing a 2nd book of images from the archive of 7,000 negatives (the image above is unpublished). 200 images made it into the first book so I have a lot of editing to do.

Fourteen years later the club has a new owner and a new world class stadium. But the story began in 1995 and was it not for the club’s fans back then they would not have a team to support now.