reLearning to See When No One Is There
It is still difficult for me to describe this style of photography whenever I see it. Is it urban? Is it quiet architectural? I am still not sure. But I am guilty of taking pictures like this, and I bet you are as well. The kind I usually discard, do not post, and never really see value in. That changed when my life slowed down, and I moved to a smaller town.
Since I moved to Norway 13 years ago, and even before that, I was always busy. Always on the run with work, travel, and even photography. In search of the perfect shot, I took thousands of images and even replaced the shutter on my DSLR once. When you first start with photography and you are curious enough, everything can be a subject.
It took me a few years to move through different genres before settling on street photography. You can see some of my older work at www.nordpole.no. When I talk about street photography, I mean the classical approach with people in their city environment and everyday candid moments. I thought this was it, the final stage of my romance with the camera.
My busy life continued with lots of work, travel, and shooting street whenever I could. Better. Faster. More. Maybe even too much. It was not always successful and not always rewarding, but from thousands of shots it was possible to find a few rare, shining nuggets of lucky frames. At the time, I needed images to fill my YouTube episodes, and I wanted to stay honest and authentic with those productions. I included pictures only from the day of filming. As you might guess, street luck is not equal every day, and you do not always come home with dozens of post worthy images with people in them.
I started to notice something. Between the shots I considered strong, there were other frames. The fillers. The experiments. The curiosities that were never meant to see the light of day. That combination, that mix, slowly began to change my perspective on what I was actually pursuing as a street photographer.
Then the time came when I resigned from my busy job. I left Oslo behind and settled away from noisy streets and everyday chaos. It was not immediate, but living in a small town began to grow on me. After years of photographing in Oslo, I had not even considered that I could photograph something else. I made many trips back, but step by step I felt drawn in a different direction.
It is easy to say there is nothing here to photograph. It is harder to find beauty in the mundane when your mind is still on the streets of New York. When you go out in the middle of the day in a small town, the streets are often empty. Even if they are not, carrying even the smallest camera can make you feel suspicious. Maybe it was a change of phase in my life, or maybe limitations sparked creativity. I began to appreciate frames without people in them.
Sometimes I think of it as visual poetry. Surfaces marked by time. A play of colors. Shafts of light. A visit to a local shopping center can become an adventure if you pay attention to the details. An everyday walk through the neighborhood makes you realize you have never looked at it with this intention and curiosity. And sometimes, the moment you stop searching is the moment you begin to find compositions.
You start to learn that there are photographers who do this, who always have, who see beauty in these moments in between. It is not that I stopped street photography altogether. Far from it. Now it makes more sense and feels like the beginning of another chapter in my journey with photography.
