A friend once wrote about my work:

"Images that look like Cannonball Adderley's alto sax sounds. ;-) " - Sara T'Rula.

Thank you Sara, I don't think anyone ever said anything so nice, and certainly nothing so eloquent.

Candid public photography, street photography. Or, the absurdities of everyday life. Unstaged photographs showing the funny, sad, peculiar, or simply just beautiful, in everyday life. None have been digitally manipulated, except to correct colour and contrast.

Street photography is the purest form of photography, stripped to it barest minimum; you, a camera and what you see. Defining street photography at first appears easy, then becomes increasingly complex, seemingly at odds with the simple act itself.

Quotes I like, by photographers, friends, authors, poets, painters, musicians, curators, historians, critics, journalists, screenwriters about, or somehow related to, street photography. Or, in one case, simply about wandering. Ideas about the definition of street photography.

"As an artist, you must cultivate a relationship with your work so that it becomes your best friend. You must be able to go to it whatever you're feeling - happy, sad, tired, bored, frustrated - and have a conversation with it." - Arthur Lett Haines, painter, artist and teacher.

'The magic hand of chance'

- John Keats

“It is a peculiar part of the good photographer’s adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it”.

-James Agee

"Basically it's a piece of luck, but luck that is earned"

- Martin Parr.

"Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment".

-John Szarkowski (1925-2007) 'Looking at Photographs'.

"In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it."

-John Steinbeck (1902-1968) ‘Travels with Charley’

“Street Photography is the photographic documenting of a scene or happening in a public place without the interaction or intervention of the photographer. It is part of the documentary tradition in photography but generally distinguished from reportage and photojournalism by its lack of a predetermined subject matter.

Typically the Street Photographer will work with a small unobtrusive camera and a short lens in order not to be noticed, great street photographs are rarely the result of particular equipment or a technical approach but more often of concentration, patience, empathy, instinct, visual curiosity and experience”.

-Nick Turpin Founder iN-PUBLiC

"Photography, at heart, is a very simple act, but exceedingly difficult to do well. It is a visual response to an emotional confrontation with the subject. After that, anyone (including the photographer) can say anything about the image with varying degrees of relevance, because subsequent meaning is supplied and applied by the viewer."

- Bill Jay (1940-2009)

"Behind every picture is a story that is not important."

- Peter Kool.

“I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos”.

-Harry Calahan (1912-1999)

“Photography is like fly-fishing. It takes extreme patience—a sort of intelligence about time”.

-Steven Shore

"Compared to reality, any fiction I could come up with at this juncture would seem very mundane. I'd never dare invent anything that crazy; no one would believe it"

- Mike Skinner (the Streets).

When asked what he is photographing, William Eggleston (1939-) simply answered "Life today".

"Many Street Photographers seem to be preoccupied with scenes that trigger an immediate emotional response, especially humour or a fascination with ambiguous or surreal happenings. A series of street photographs may show a ‘crazy’ world, perhaps ‘dreamlike’. This is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Street Photography, the fact that these ‘crazy’, ‘unreal’ images were all made in the most ‘everyday’ and ‘real’ location, the street.

It was this paradox that fascinated me and kept me shooting in the ‘everyday’ streets of London when many of my colleagues were traveling to the world's famines and war zones in search of exciting subject matter. Friends that I met for lunch would, just be back from the ‘war in Bosnia’ and I would declare proudly that I was just back from the ‘sales on Oxford Street".

-Nick Turpin Founder iN-PUBLiC (2000)

"I really do want people to use their eyes as they go through life...when you look at things rather than through them, life starts absolutely crackling with interest and excitement"

- John Betjeman.

Thank you to all Flickr people who have taken the time to look, comment and fave my photographs. You have contributed to my work in a very real way. Or as Noel Coward said, "I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise".

Interviews.

In 2006 I had a discussion with Michael David Murphy about my work, on his Street Photography website 2point8

Interview in 2014 on B.

blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2014/08/nils-jorgensen-what-was...

Other places.

In 2002 I joined the street photography collective In-Public. I resigned in 2018 on principle; the collective's support of CGI images is inconsistent with my own views of street photography. "Composited", "computational", "digitally manipulated", "invented reality", "CGI", "compromised", or "computer generated" images have nothing to do with, and is not, street photography.

I re-join in 2020 after Nick Turpin resurrected In-Public with a new mandate; no composited", "computational", "digitally manipulated", "invented reality", "CGI", "compromised", "computer generated" or posed images.

Contact:-

jorgensen.nils@gmail.com

Tel: 07833393145