RPS Meeting 05/07/2019
Peter Aitchison – Travel and Street Photography
The information about this meeting described Peter Aitchison’s career:
Peter began his photographic career some 30 years ago, training as a studio assistant and having decided that studio work was not for him, his career progressed into PR and national press photography, including time spent as a Royal Rota photographer.
Travel, which Peter enjoyed enormously, was a fundamental part of his newspaper work and it was a natural progression for him to subsequently follow his passion to work on his collection of travel images. He currently hosts international photo tours, together with photo walks in Manchester.
His talk started with an introduction to his career and then he presented some of his images of India, and Cuba, reflecting their culture and people. In the afternoon session gave a presentation on Manchester street photography.
His travel images appear to me to form three broad types: showing scenery and architecture, groups of people and more formal portraits of a person in their normal setting. I have tried to describe important aspects of the presentation which I learned.
The first of these is to do with the style of his images. He said in his presentation that the incorporation of colour and texture was important, and it is clear from the images on his website that the colours in his foreign images are particularly vibrant. He did not describe how he achieves this, but did imply that he uses post-processing techniques to emphasise this aspect.
Many of his portraits are in black and white and he said he chooses to show an image in monochrome when there are particularly strong textures, particularly in a face.
One aspect of his slide show which was quite striking was his choice of framing of the image. All the images he showed had a black border with a white surround. He explained that this was a customised format he used in Lightroom, but he did not elaborate on his choice of this style. However to me it made the images have a style reminiscent of those of Cartier-Bresson, all edged with a black border.
A second aspect to his work was his description of his technique when taking portraits in the street. He emphasised the importance of engaging with his subjects by involving them in conversation and showing them the image on his camera. This seems very similar to the approach also described by Don McCullin which I described in my account of a television programme about this.
Another interesting theme from his presentation was that of the ethics of taking images in the street in candid and informal setting. He stressed his practice of being very open and obvious as to what he was doing and considered using telephoto lenses from a distance to take images of people “stealing the picture”.
A further ethical issue he considered was the approach to taking images in situations like the slums of Mumbai. He supports an educational charity for the children of the slums for his trips. He said he takes images of “happy” people, and avoids images of rough sleeping which he considers “poverty porn”. There seems to me to be a major ethical debate here about ethical tourism, rather than documentary photography. This is a subject I will consider in future posts (maybe in future modules…).
Andrew Procter 