Shot of the week

I  had a second hand shop for a short while, I used to sell second hand goods on markets during the same time. It's an interesting world with a lot of characters in it.  So I was very pleased to come across this shot of 18th century life in Newcastle, while using The Guardian Eyewitness app on my ipad (a picture a day basically)


It's fitting that Aaron Guy*, the man that found the glass negatives works at Newcastle's Mining Institute. He's not struck coal, he's struck gold

Shooting the street never gets old

You can see more here
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That photograph is just beautiful to me. It has everything I look for in a photograph. It has a certain distance to it, but it's social comment. I'm guessing or at least like to think that the photographer was not from the same world as the people in the photograph but wanted to show a part of English life worth documenting, which is one of the very best reason to take a photograph.  It's beautifully balanced, nothing in the frame is out of place, it looks so easily made, but that's just not the case at all, it's a complex image that rivals an Evans (Evans didn't really do social comment though).

To quote Robert Adams...

"Only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is common place"



*A kindred spirit for Smithy