Last Updated on 06/20/2024 by Chris Gampat
“I have a counterproposal: A Street Photographer Gets Serious about Place,” says photographer Allen Wheatcroft to the Phoblographer in an interview when we asked about how his thought process changes based on being in the suburbs. After explaining that he’s not, we can’t help but think that this is all we see in stark contrast to much of his other work. This is a clear demonstration of the power of framing. “…in one sense this project answers the question ‘what would I have if I took street photos mostly without the people?’ The project is about the places where people live and the ways they make places their own – or try to.”
All images by Allen Wheatcroft. Used with permission. For more, please check out his website and Instagram @alwheatphoto. Be sure to check out his book Björkevägen and The Northside at the publisher.
It’s important for Allen that he didn’t drop in briefly and move on to create the photos that we see in the rest of his portfolio. Much of the photos take place in Chicago — a place he calls home. “I’d like to say that it then expanded in neat concentric waves, but the expansion wasn’t so neat, more like a dropped jar of jam, messy,” he tells us. However, this project required a different approach. Much of his other work is put together in the edit and then arranged into a book. For this, he was thinking about the book from the onset.
In The Northside, the northern tier of Chicago’s neighborhoods forms the center of gravity. The photos in Björkevägen were taken in Sörmland, a mostly rural area in Sweden. The Sweden photos come from a few villages, a small city, and coastal resort, a town that also hosts some light industry.
Allen Wheatcroft
Allen Wheatcroft first got into photography in his early 20s. He borrowed his brother’s Pentax SLR and began taking photos of people on the streets. “The ’thing’ was the ability to see and create relationships among people and things,” he tells us. These days, he’s using a Leica Q2 along with a Leica SL2 and 24-90mm lens. “One street habit I kept was to carry a camera with me when not purposefully shooting,” he tells us. “The SL2 is too bulky for this, so I often had a mirrorless Sony rx100.” Indeed, he’s going for showcasing images that look human and not like they’re made by a Generative AI.
In fact, Allen hasn’t been disturbed by AI just yet because it hasn’t crept into his world. “I’m not doing documentary or news or persuasive stuff, where AI seems downright dangerous,” he states. “I’m still enough of a street photographer to have in mind Garry Winogrand’s aphorism: ‘I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.’ But I’m also after a conversation.” To that end, he’s avoided the new Adobe AI tools.
He’s reached a point where so many modern photographers have yet to reach: thinking about photo books first. It’s something that we see with Cig Harvey and Jens Krauer. Both of these folks are ones we’d consider true photographers first — and perhaps any other label you wish second.
“When laying the book out, I had, of course, a new level of relationships – among the pictures – to work with,” Allen explains. For two years, he and Caleb Cain Marcus (who designed his other book) worked on laying it out. “For more than two years, Caleb and I worked together on photo selections, sequence and movement, layout, etc. that would create/keep the mood and feeling of the shooting. Our goal was to keep a feeling of freedom, which, despite the constraints, I had as I shot.”
The two looked for variety, humor, ways to elicit smiles, mystery, chose specific colors that they felt supported the goal, etc.
“There aren’t many people in the photographs we selected – none in The Northside – yet we felt that the images themselves are human, and we chose scale to reinforce that.”
AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT
The Phoblographer works with human photographers to verify that they’ve actually created their work through shoots. These are done by providing us assets such as BTS captures, screenshots of post-production, extra photos from the shoot, etc. We do this to help our readers realize that this is authentically human work. Here’s what this photographer provided for us.
