About This Website
My name is Ian Talbot and I am a photographer living in London.
From the end of 2013 I have been walking the streets of London on an almost daily basis, making images of everything and anything that engages my attention. This practice constitutes a major departure from virtually all the work I had previously done. With a professional background in fashion photography, my more fine art based work of recent years has been largely in the area of both still life and/or more generally ‘conceptual’ imagery.
In spite of the fact that a large number of my images are made ‘on the street’, so to speak, I have never consciously set out to become, for want of a better term, a ‘street photographer’ per se. Neither is this new work intended to document London. Not even ‘my London’, even though I was born and brought up here and have lived here for a large part of my life. Yet, in some sense, that is how it has turned out, albeit in a largely ‘organic’ way. How could it be otherwise?
My usual method has remained the same: I travel to a part of London (it almost doesn’t matter where, particularly, but mostly the West End) and, usually carrying 2 or 3 small digital cameras with fast wide, standard and medium telephoto lenses, I start walking and shooting. For the past year or so I have switched to using a Leica M9 with the same range of lenses. Working in short bursts I generally keep moving at a fairly brisk pace, pausing only to capture a particular image that catches my attention. Sometimes I will shoot on the move too, without stopping at all. In this way the images I make are based on a mere ‘glance’, in passing as it were, as opposed to any intensive ‘looking’. I am sure that in this way I miss many potential images. It doesn’t seem to matter very much though…
You can see my earlier, more 'conceptual' work here:
Objectively Speaking
From the end of 2013 I have been walking the streets of London on an almost daily basis, making images of everything and anything that engages my attention. This practice constitutes a major departure from virtually all the work I had previously done. With a professional background in fashion photography, my more fine art based work of recent years has been largely in the area of both still life and/or more generally ‘conceptual’ imagery.
In spite of the fact that a large number of my images are made ‘on the street’, so to speak, I have never consciously set out to become, for want of a better term, a ‘street photographer’ per se. Neither is this new work intended to document London. Not even ‘my London’, even though I was born and brought up here and have lived here for a large part of my life. Yet, in some sense, that is how it has turned out, albeit in a largely ‘organic’ way. How could it be otherwise?
My usual method has remained the same: I travel to a part of London (it almost doesn’t matter where, particularly, but mostly the West End) and, usually carrying 2 or 3 small digital cameras with fast wide, standard and medium telephoto lenses, I start walking and shooting. For the past year or so I have switched to using a Leica M9 with the same range of lenses. Working in short bursts I generally keep moving at a fairly brisk pace, pausing only to capture a particular image that catches my attention. Sometimes I will shoot on the move too, without stopping at all. In this way the images I make are based on a mere ‘glance’, in passing as it were, as opposed to any intensive ‘looking’. I am sure that in this way I miss many potential images. It doesn’t seem to matter very much though…
You can see my earlier, more 'conceptual' work here:
Objectively Speaking