B&W Street Photography Essay – India, China & U.K.

The content of this post was submitted to Edge of Humanity Magazine by Matt Nelson a photographer and writer at The Street Dog Collective.

“Streets – Volume 1”

By Matt Nelson

I spent 6 months on a previous project, in hotel rooms and apartments shooting self portraits showing the isolation and pain that comes with addiction. I needed to get out and start spending time in society and with humanity so a photography project focusing on the Streets seemed like a good idea. I’m lucky in that my work sends me to some pretty amazing locations; Shanghai, Hong Kong, London and Mumbai to name a few.

For this project I didn’t really have a complete goal in mind, some of my favorite photographers fall under the category of ‘Street Photographers’ and I wanted to explore this. I’ve always been someone who focuses on my moments, I remember vividly times in my life that were important to me, things like a first kiss, holidays with the family, there are moments that are frozen in my mind so I wanted to do the same, to capture moments that I saw on the streets in the cities mentioned above. I didn’t really create any rules, that it had to show a certain emotion in the people I shot or that I had to send a social message, for me this was about taking myself outside, re-entering society. I think it was Daido Moriyama who said something along the lines of we shoot portraits of ourselves, not the people we are shooting. This project embodies that for me, the majority of images are gritty, they show a person or people in isolation, sometimes that the world is consuming them but are interspersed by beautiful images of hope. Given my past this is probably exactly where I am at the moment, at times I’m lost, still coming to terms with my past, sometimes scared and running away from my past but within all of this I’m out of the darkness and like the 2 birds there is a sense of freedom and a belief that I am growing as a person and moving forward.