Category: How They Saw It

How Daido Moriyama Used Time of Day

Moriyama does not appear to have a preferred hour. He appears to have preferred a state.

The state is one of continuous movement through a city, camera raised, at whatever hour the city happens to be doing something worth photographing. This turns out to be most hours. Tokyo, Shinjuku in particular, does not have a quiet period so much as it has different registers of noise. Moriyama photographed all of them.

How Todd Hido Used Weather

Todd Hido photographs at night, in rain, in fog, in the particular grey of a suburban American winter, and the results look like the opening scene of a film in which something has already gone wrong.

This is not an accident.

How Saul Leiter Used Light

Saul Leiter spent most of his life in the same neighbourhood in New York and made photographs that look like nothing else in the history of the medium.

The neighbourhood was the East Village. The photographs were made from windows, through glass, across reflections, in snow, in rain, in the particular amber light of a city that never quite goes dark. He was not looking for the decisive moment. He was looking at what was in front of him, which was often a smeared reflection of a taxi in a wet window, and finding it sufficient.

How Fan Ho Used Geography

Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s was not short of photographers. Fan Ho was the one who understood it.

Not the whole city. A particular city - the one made of narrow lanes and geometry and steam and the light that falls between buildings in a way that does not fall anywhere else. He photographed Hong Kong the way a person photographs a face they have been looking at for a long time. Not documenting. Recognising.

How Chris Killip Used Time of Day

Most photographers set an alarm for golden hour. Killip did not appear to own one.

In Flagrante, his 1988 monograph documenting the working communities of northeast England during the Thatcher years, contains almost no golden hour photography. No warm light bouncing romantically off wet cobblestones. No long shadows doing anything interesting. What it contains instead is the flat, grey, non-committal light of an overcast Tuesday in November, the light of a place that had no interest in being picturesque, photographed by someone who had no interest in making it so.

This is worth paying attention to.