Making a small photo series about one street

You do not have to travel to start a photo series. The street you walk down to buy bread has more in it than a city you visit for a long weekend, because you can go back on a wet Tuesday, at closing time, and again next month. What you give up in novelty you get back in depth. By the third visit you stop photographing what the street looks like and start noticing how it behaves.

Here is how we would suggest making a small series from one street: a place to work, a rule to work under, and enough visits to see something change. Treat it as a starting point and adjust it to the street you have.

Choose a street you can keep returning to

Convenience matters more than beauty here. A handsome street twenty minutes away will lose out to a plain one you pass every day, because a series is made from repeat visits and the distance decides how many you will make.

Look for one that you can walk from end to end in about ten minutes, and that has something in it to change over a day: a school, a bakery, a bus stop, shutters that go up and come down. Then walk it once with the camera in your bag and notice which side gets the sun, and when.

Before you shoot, set the edges and write them down. “From the pharmacy to the footbridge” is enough. It sounds like a small thing until the evening when the light is lovely one corner too far along. A series about one street stays about one street only if you stay on it.

Give yourself one small rule

A rule gives a series its character more reliably than any preset. It also spares you from deciding what to photograph every time you arrive. A few that work well:

• One viewpoint: shoot only from the east pavement, looking across.
• One subject: doorways, or the things people leave outside them.
• One hour: the twenty minutes after the shops open, on as many days as you can manage.
• One height: everything from the waist, or everything above the shop signs.

If you can explain your rule in a single sentence, it is probably simple enough. Do not mistake it for the working sentence we suggest in editing a shoot down to a set. The rule governs what you shoot, and the working sentence governs what you keep. You will write the second one later, once you know what the street has actually given you.

Break the rule when something better turns up, and keep those frames in a separate folder. If they turn out to be stronger than the rest, the street has told you what the series should have been, and you can change course.

Go back at the hours you would rather skip

The first visit tends to produce the pictures anyone would take. The later ones are where the series comes from. Draw a rough grid in a notebook, with times of day down the side and weather across the top, and tick a box after each visit. The empty boxes tell you where to go next: before the shutters open, in the flat light of midday, straight after rain, on a Sunday when half the street is asleep.

Also try picking one spot and making the same frame every time you come. Stand on the same paving stone, at the same height, facing the same way. Taken alone, those pictures are rarely your best. Side by side, they show what no single frame can: the washing that appears and disappears, the café tables that move with the shade, the scaffolding that goes up in spring. A repeated view like this can also hold the finished series together.

Keep each visit short. Half an hour at the right moment beats a whole afternoon of waiting, and you are more likely to come back if it does not feel like an expedition.

Remember that you will be seen here too

Photographing a street once, you are a passer-by. Photographing it for a month, you are the person with the camera, and the man at the key-cutting stall will have noticed by your third visit. It is better to get ahead of that. Say hello, explain in a sentence what you are doing, and offer to show the pictures when they are done. These conversations often lead to the things you could never have found alone, such as which shop used to be a cinema, though you should report a story like that as something you were told.

A series also carries a risk that a single picture does not, because repetition can reveal routine. A set of mornings might show when someone leaves for work, which house stands empty during the day, or the route a child takes to school. Look at the finished sequence with that in mind, and be especially careful around children, house numbers and anyone who seems to be having a hard time. Our guidelines rule out publishing private information such as home addresses, and the habits in captioning street photos responsibly apply to every frame.

On a small residential street, consider whether you need to name it at all. “A street near the river” may serve the story just as well and ask less of the people who live there.

Sequence it, and be honest about time

When you have enough, lay everything out as small prints or thumbnails and sort them by distance. You want a wide frame or two to place the reader, some middle-distance pictures where things happen, and a few close details for texture. Most street work comes back heavy on the middle, so the gaps are usually easy to spot, and you can go back to fill them. That is the great advantage of this subject.

Three shapes tend to suit a single street:

1. The walk: one end to the other, so the order follows the pavement.
2. The day: dawn to dark, with frames drawn from many different visits.
3. The refrain: your repeated view returns every few pictures, with other frames in between.

The second shape needs one line of honesty. If you have folded six weeks into a single apparent day, tell the reader. It costs you nothing, and it stops anyone from believing that the rain and the sunshine came on the same afternoon.

Say how it was made, and decide when to stop

A series about one street needs very few words. A short opening can do most of the work: where the street is, as far as you are willing to say, how many visits you made, and what your rule was. For example, you might write: “Ten pictures from one block, made over six mornings. I shot only from the east pavement, and only before the shutters went up.” That tells the reader how to look, and the rule itself often becomes part of the pleasure.

On FernPrint, you can keep this kind of work together by giving it its own category, as our features page describes. If you split a longer post into visits or hours under headings, readers also get a table of contents and can jump to the part they want.

Stopping is the hard part, since a street is never finished. A practical signal is coming home twice in a row with pictures you already have. At that point, edit and post what you have. Leave the grid in the notebook, with its empty boxes. The street will still be there next winter, a little different, and you will have a reason to walk down it with a camera again.