Dallas Street Portraits

I must confess, I love making these portraits of complete strangers.  I have done this a few times over the last several months: simply throw up a backdrop, put up a single light source, and then start pulling people off the street to make photographs of… In a way, it is kind of like scooping fish out of a fishtank…your subjects have been removed from their environment, from their context. I guess that I am just interested in the relationship between people and places. Or, to put it in the form of a question, how different would the composition of passerbys be if I were setup outside the tee box of a golf course versus setup outside of the county hospital ER?  How significant is place to the general make-up of the near-by people?  One way to explore this is to set up and shoot in as many locations as possible…

So, one weekend, after being in Dallas for planning sessions and a shoot, a few friends and I decided to go out and practice the process…

Once we decided that we wanted to go ahead with the street studio idea, we went out to find a place in Dallas that would have decent foot traffic and some interesting people… We settled on a street in Oak Cliff across from a couple of restaurants and book shops.

First step: unpack the gear, put up the backdrop, get the cameras on sticks, and generally decide how to approach the day…

Next up, get the lights in place and start to shoot a few test images to begin to dial in…  One of me, one of my friend and fellow photographer, Bob…

Last thing before really getting going…find a subject willing to stand in for a minute to fine tune any lighting issues, test out the process, and get the ball rolling… Fortunately for us, this little guy could have stood there posing all day… actually, he tried to stay and keep helping… :)

So, here is a sampling of some of the people who happened to be cruising Oak Cliff on a particular, if not normal, Saturday morning…

Previously, when I have made these street portraits, I would often pass out numbered cards with contact information and have the subjects hold it up for the last frame so that each of them were “numbered” for my reference. (I send digital copies to everyone who emails me to ask for a copy…) However, since this was a last minute project decision, all I had were business cards and instructions to just “email me and describe yourself” so that I could send out images… Let’s just say that asking people to describe themselves is asking for some rather humorous emails…

Next up for this project?  Not sure, hope to include video “street portraits” as well as branching out to specific locations to start looking for demographic trends… We just need to nail down our “look” and make an efficient system for set-up and tear-down.  I anticipate shooting in places in which both will need to be accomplished quickly.