On Documentary and Portrait
Photography likes categories. Portrait. Documentary. Commercial. Fine art. Neat boxes.
I don’t believe in them. I never have.
Whether I am standing on a street in Rome watching the light change, working with a subject in a studio in London, or walking through my home town in Sandwich at the hour when the town empties and the light drops low across the rooftops, I am doing exactly the same thing.
Waiting, watching, reducing. I wait for the moment when someone stops performing and something true walks into the frame. The camera doesn’t care which category it’s in.When I work with a portrait subject, we talk. I let the room settle. Eventually something changes.
The effort behind the eyes begins to disappear. Whoever they actually are quietly takes their place. It lives in small shifts, the way the jaw loosens, the way someone holds their breath, the moment they stop thinking about the camera. That’s what I’m there for.
On the street it’s no different, I walk without looking to take a photograph. I watch. I wait for the moment that I become a part of the view. A gesture, a quality of light. Two people who don’t know they’ve become a photograph.
The discipline is the same, the patience is the same, the thing I’m searching for is the same. The way I use the camera grows from that belief.
Much of modern portrait photography celebrates shallow depth of field. The background dissolves, distractions disappear, and attention is directed exactly where the photographer chooses. I have found myself travelling in the opposite direction. I often work at f/16 and sometimes even f/32. Not because I’m trying to prove a point but because I don’t believe character exists only in the eyes.
I believe it exists in the hands, in clothes worn for years, in scars, in posture, in the rooms people choose to live and work in, in the objects they’ve surrounded themselves with.Documentary photography taught me that details are rarely distractions. More often, they’re evidence. That’s why I work the way I do. I’m not trying to tell people where to look. I’m asking them to see.
I’m not the first to see this way. Adams, Weston, Avedon, photographers who believed everything in the frame deserved to be present, they walked this path long before me. When I first found their work, I recognised something of my own in it.
Avedon’s American West portraits stay with me most. Drifters, miners, waitresses, ordinary people photographed against plain white paper, with nothing softened and nothing to hide behind. No landscape, no romance, no myth. Just a person, rendered so completely that you can’t look away. People called those portraits cruel. I think they were the opposite. He took people the world walked past and gave them the kind of attention usually reserved for the powerful. That, to me, is what clarity is for.
People often ask which I prefer, documentary or portraiture. It’s the wrong question.
Documentary taught me how to wait without forcing.
Portraiture taught me how to look without asking.
Together they became the same eye, applied to different rooms.That’s why my portraits and documentary photographs sit together without apology. Not because I’ve decided to work across different genres, but because they’ve always come from the same place, the same discipline, the same curiosity, the same search for honesty.
Every portrait contains a document.
Every document contains a portrait.
The only difference is which one announces itself.
