Less a Style Than a Trace
A few days ago, Shutter Stories described my photography as exploring “the quiet drama of structure, texture, and atmosphere.”
Generous words. Perhaps too generous to fully accept. Still, they made me pause.
Around the same time, I watched a video by Sean Tucker. Not as a lesson. More as a mirror. What stayed with me was not the idea of defining a style. It was almost the opposite.
Maybe style is not something we decide. Maybe it is something we slowly recognise, after enough photographs have shown us what keeps coming back.
I hesitate to use the word. It sounds too deliberate. Like a badge.
A trace of temperament.
A trace of the places where we feel true, and the places where we do not.
I have never felt fully at home in what people call street photography. I admire the chaos. The proximity. The courage of entering the crowd. But I am not naturally at the centre of things. I am more often at the edge.
I watch before I enter. Sometimes I do not enter at all.
For a long time, I thought this was a limitation. Something to correct. A lack of courage, perhaps. Or perhaps it is simply where my photography begins.
Figures slightly apart.
Architecture larger than the body.
Stone, glass, shadow, silence.
But perhaps what returns is not only the subject. It is the distance. The need for stillness. The way of waiting before the image appears.
I thought these were visual choices — geometry, contrast, negative space. And they are.
About what I notice.
About what I avoid.
About what I cannot stop seeing.
A way of seeing does not always need to be invented. Sometimes it only needs to be recognised.
Maybe that is what style becomes, if we are patient enough.
Just what returns, honestly, over time.
The distances we keep choosing.
The silences we keep entering.
Not quite a style, perhaps.
More like a trace.
Selected Works
.jpg)
Philippe, this resonates deeply.
ReplyDeleteI have also come to feel that style is less something we impose on the work, and more something the work gradually reveals back to us. We think we are making choices about geometry, contrast, distance, negative space, or silence, but over time those choices begin to look less like decisions and more like evidence.
In my own BNW Photography, I often find myself returning to stillness, isolation, and the quiet tension between subject and surrounding space. I am drawn to what is slightly apart, overlooked, or waiting to be noticed. For a long time, I also wondered whether this was a limitation, especially when compared with the more immediate courage of street photography. But perhaps the edge is not outside the photograph. Perhaps, for some of us, the edge is where the photograph begins.
Your idea of “trace” feels very true to me. It suggests something more honest than style. Not a signature we design, but a residue of attention. The repeated evidence of what we notice, what we avoid, what we wait for, and what we cannot stop seeing.
Perhaps the most meaningful work begins when we stop trying to become a certain kind of photographer, and start recognizing the photographer who has already been quietly appearing in the images all along.
Thank you for putting words to something many of us feel but rarely articulate so clearly.
Dave Payne
dave@bnwbistro.com
Thank you very much, Dave.
DeleteI really appreciate you taking the time to leave this here. Your words add something valuable to the piece, especially this idea of the edge being where the photograph begins.
I think many of us slowly discover that we are not inventing a way of seeing so much as recognising it, image after image.