About Lloyd Spencer

 

[right: The observer observed, a photo by Cybergabi]

 

 

“YOUR OWN photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too—photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.”
—————————————–(Robert Adams, ‘Why People Photograph’)

I have become increasingly serious about photography, especially ’street’ or candid photography.

After I bought my first serious camera in Jan 1981 I spent an intensive period taking photos on the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa. But once the children were born the family album dominated my photographic horizon for many years. It is digital photography that has allowed me to take to the streets with my camera once again.

That first camera was bought in recognition of a contribution I made to the processes that went into the making of Another Way of Telling by John Berger and Jean Mohr. It was that work that first introduced me to my great hero, Andre Kertesz. In Bradford in 1984 I got to meet Kertesz on the occasion of his 90th birthday. In the same week that I bought that camera I met and became friends with the professional photographer, Paul Weinberg.

Early in 2006 I decided that I wanted to commit myself to serious photographic project of some sort and I decided on impulse one busy Saturday in the city centre that I would concentrate on Briggate and the pedestrianized retail centre of my adopted home, Leeds, UK.

When I was explaining that project to someone in the city centre they told me about the flickr photo-sharing website and there I discovered an enthusiastic, creative and unpretentious bunch of photographers. Interaction with my ‘contacts’ in the Leeds flickr group and with other flickr ‘contacts’ around the world have been hugely important to my photography in the past few years. I hope to make that importance clearer by blogging some of their photos on this weblog.

So a huge number of my photos are collected on the flickr website. You can check them out there without having to sign up. http://www.flickr.com/people/lloydspencer/

 

During that intensive period (1981-82) after I bought my first decent camera, I started visiting a photographic library regularly and spent a lot of time looking really closely at the work of the masters. The habit of looking at the best photographs has never left me. I will use this weblog to explore some of the images that have left a real impression on me. As a place marker for this intention I offer the ‘classic’ Walker Evans photograph below.