Any comments please, on my review from LensCulture?
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Submission Reviews – LensCulture – Series Category by Keith Goldstein
Within my work, I try to capture a mirror of the emotions within myself. I look outside to look inside. I am not looking for truth. I seek proof of life.
Reviewer Feedback
Keith, thanks for submitting these intense scenes of street-life.
In the urban jungle, photographers have the challenge to put in relation various – often conflicting – levels: traces, things, architecture and, obviously, people. I think you accomplished this mission, and choosing to focus on people makes your work spread through the feelings of humanity and empathy. I guess this is because you “look outside to look inside”, as you wrote in your statement.
I particularly enjoyed some of your pictures, as “Father and son”: the father’s gesture of putting his mature hand on the eyes of the little one looks like a desperate attempt to protect the enchantment of childhood from the hardness of life. I can find the same intensity in pictures n. 3, 4, 5, 9, 10 (in your sequence). The remaining selection is a bit less incisive, partly because the situations represented are more ordinary.
Anyway, all the images are well composed, and I’ve notice particularly a sense of movement (dynamism) in the most successful of them. It means you explore your subject in a truly active way, and this is great.
In order to make this submission more cohesive, and strong, consider to remove color. Black and white, in this kind of scenes, is a formidable way to preserve the original emotion you felt while shooting. I don’t think you need color to create more emphasis.
To get the idea of how black and white could be strong enough in visual terms, please look at the work of Josef Koudelka (among my book recommendations)
I believe that, in order to get a successful body of work in reportage photography, it’s crucial to shoot a huge (hundreds and more…) amount of pictures, and then proceeding to a very good selection of them. This is why I recommend you to keep on shooting a lot.
Moreover, to became a good editor of your work, it’s extremely important to look at books and work of other photographers.
All the best.
Additional Recommendations
Recommended Books
- Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image
- The Americans, by Robert Frank
- Photography as Activism: Images for Social Change by Michelle Bogre
- Josef Koudelka, Invasion Prague 68
Relevant Quotes from Past Jurors
- “Remember, without editing, there is no articulation. Selection and ordering means creating authority over your expression. It is what makes music out of noise, or meaning out of words. Photographic editing is somewhere in between music and (linear) writing.” — Erik Vroons , Chief Editor, GUP Magazine, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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