The Inspiration
Basically I'm envious. These photographers created the kind of images I wish I had captured.......
Bert HardyBritish documentary and news photographer who was the very antithesis of a celebrity photographer. As a photographer for the mass-circulation magazine Picture Post, he had a gift for capturing the gritty streets and no-frill lives of people living through the blitz of WWII and in the poorest districts of post-war Britain. Hardy died in 1995 and has no personal website. The image I've chosen here (The Gorbals Boys, 1949) links to his collection at the Photographer's Gallery in London. |
Jim MortramTo my mind, Jim Mortram is one of the finest documentary photographers working in the UK today with his strikingly honest, bare bones photography. He doesn't do this for a living; all the people whose lives he chronicles are known to him personally. In 2006 he started capturing images of the people in his hometown of Dereham in the English county of Norfolk, focusing on the disadvantaged and socially excluded. The project was named 'Small Town Inertia', eventually published in book form. |
Jane BownJane Bown was one of the most respected British portrait photographers of the last century, specialising in photographing famous people for the Observer newspaper, with a preference for artists of all kinds. What makes her stand out from other great portrait photographers isn't necessarily the kinds of images she captured but the intuitive way in which he went about her trade. She used the same Olympus camera and 50mm camera for decades, ignored light meters and only used available light. This image of Samuel Beckett is probably my favourite portrait, ever. |
Ara GülerAn eclectic Armenian-Turkish documentary, street and portrait photographer, Ara Güler photographed anybody from heads of state and celebrities to street urchins and everyone in between, in both colour and black and white. He also denied that photography was an art form. His monochrome images depicting the working class people of mid-20th century Istanbul are the images that stand out for me. I don't much like his other work. In 2015 I went to the coffee shop he owned in Istanbul hoping to shake his hand and thank him for the photographs, but of course, he wasn't there. |