Street Photography Tips, Interaction, Travel, Guides
* “Master Profiles” is a series profiling all the great photographers of uncontrolled life. Unlike the rest of the blog, I’m doing these in a straight profile format to make it easy for quick access to facts, quotes and knowledge on all the masters. I’ll also group them together here every time I add a new one.
William Klein (1928-Present)
American photographer known for creating his own influential style that ignored all the rules.
*A series of guides on shooting Street Photography in cities around the world. Find the best spots to shoot, things to capture, safety concerns, street tips, and more for cities around the world. I have personally researched, explored and shot Street Photography in every city that I create a guide for. So you can be ready to capture the streets as soon as you step outside with your camera!
A little while back I decided to include a few posts/stories about some of the negative experiences that have come about from shooting street photography during my 100 cities project. I want this blog to be open, honest, and hopefully interesting, so that should include the times that don’t go perfectly too. In the first post, I wrote about a physical confrontation over street photography that I had in Istanbul. While they’re very rare, confrontations can occur in street photography, but for this post I wanted to cover something that happened to me that I never would have expected.
During my visit to Chefchaouen, Morocco, I was actually arrested for street photography. But it wasn’t as simple as that. The story behind why and how is the most surprising part, and now that I’m free, it’s also the most entertaining part, for me…
This Sunday’s Street Shot of the Week was taken in the medina near Bab Rcif in Fes, Morocco. In a country full of elaborate medinas, nothing compares to the one in Fes. It’s more like a whole city and you could easily spend days walking around and getting lost in the maze. The medina here is as much for the locals living within its walls as the tourists visiting.
I had just started the day and entered the medina through the Bab Recif gate. Much of the medina is so narrow and packed that the sunlight is blocked out, but along this busy alley, there were some sun rays shining in beautifully. I noticed a large mirror that reflected against an area where one of those beams of light hit. So I waited to see if I could catch someone against it at the right time.
I saw this woman dressed in blue with a yellow bag coming so I got in the right position for the frame to include both her and her reflection, with the alley in between. Luckily, the sunlight hit the lens just right so it added those two sunbeams in the shot too.
I finished off my visit to Morocco flying out of Casablanca. While Casablanca is the biggest city in Morocco, not many stay longer than it takes to fly in and out. Most visitors come here for all the other cities in Morocco, but you don’t hear anybody recommend visiting Casablanca. Since it is a large, well-known city, I wanted to see how deserving this was so I decided to leave a couple of days to explore the city before I left Morocco.
While it was easy to see why it’s not high on the list for travelers to Morocco, I did find it worth exploring for street photographers. At first impression, it’s a somewhat ugly, charmless sprawl of an urban city. Deteriorating and dirty without many attractions. There isn’t much info online so I really had to discover the city on my own, by foot. I found underneath this uninspiring exterior, there was plenty of life and interest to capture. I enjoyed the urban city side of Morocco and while it’s not pretty, there’s still some character there for street photography.
I only had 2 days here so it didn’t give me much opportunity to capture as many photos as usual, but I still wanted to keep with 33 photos series theme, anyway. So here’s 33 street photography photos from 2 days in Casablanca, Morocco…
While Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco, it doesn’t get much love. People might fly in and out of the city, but it’s hard to find anyone recommending staying here longer than that. I wanted to find out if there was a good reason for this so I made sure to spend a few days here before flying out at the end of my visit to Morocco.
The truth is, after exploring the city, I can understand why people don’t love it compared to Morocco’s other attractions, but for street photography, I found many reasons that made me happy I gave it a chance.
So here are my first impressions of Casablanca, from my personal Street Photographer perspective…
Kaushal Parikh is a street, travel and documentary photographer from Mumbai, India. In 2011 he founded the Indian street photography collective, That’s Life, and has become one of the most well-known names in contemporary street photography in India.
Kaushal recently took almost a decade’s work across India to create his first book, titled Fragments of a Spinning Rock. Fragments is not your typical photo book, though, as Kaushal created a full, artistic and personal experience for viewers to enjoy. Poetry is used throughout the book to help take you along the photographic journey and India’s streets and natural life are blended with his own personal life. This creative approach really helps showcase Kaushal’s beautiful black and white images of gritty and striking contrast.
From the book’s layout to how it juxtaposes the streets and nature, while including a strong touch of Kaushal’s personal relationship with his family and son, everything about Fragments of a Spinning Rock is unique. Since Fragments was released at the end of March, it has only been met with high praise and glowing reviews. So in honor of his new book, I got together with Kaushal to talk about Fragments in a new series here at Shooter Files, Behind the Book.
This Sunday’s Street Shot of the Week was taken in Casablanca, Morocco. I was exploring Casablanca’s medina, which is a much more urban medina than other Moroccan cities. There’s an interesting mix of medina life and big city life here and it was one of my favorite spots in the city for street photography.
It was later in the day, about an hour before sunset, so the light was great and the streets were full of children playing after school. Outlined in shadow, I noticed a mattress and colorful textiles stood up on the sidewalk where people’s shadows hit perfectly as they walked by.
I was waiting to see if I could capture anything interesting when this little boy walked up and leaned against the mattress. At the same time, I noticed another little boy the same size walking towards him. So I waited to capture his shadow facing the opposite direction on the textiles. Since the sun was low, I was able to catch his shadow just as he walked out of the photo and create a slight illusion of the two boys on the sidewalk.
*A series of guides on shooting Street Photography in cities around the world. Find the best spots to shoot, things to capture, safety concerns, street tips, and more for cities around the world. I have personally researched, explored and shot Street Photography in every city that I create a guide for. So you can be ready to capture the streets as soon as you step outside with your camera!
