Styles / Street & snapshot
Diaristic snapshot photography
- Key: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.
The flash reaches only what is near it, so shadows and background fall to black. Leave the lamps’ own colour in: do not correct sodium orange, tungsten amber or fluorescent green.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees
Wolfgang Tillmans, Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees, 1992. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (uploaded by the artist, permission ticket 2014050910011123). Source: Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees at Wikimedia Commons
Colour snapshots of the photographer's own life: friends and lovers in bed, in the bath, dressing up, getting high, fighting, dancing and grieving, shot up close at night with a flash on a small 35 mm camera. Faces are flat and shiny in the flash, backgrounds fall to black, colours are saturated and warm, framing is quick and often crooked. The pictures matter because the photographer belongs to the scene; shown as slideshows, books and walls of prints, they read as a diary.
How the look is made
- Photograph only the people you live with, love and go out with, and keep doing it for years.
- Get close: within arm's reach, in the bedroom, the bathroom, the club.
- Use the flash on the camera at night and accept hard light, shine and black backgrounds.
- Shoot fast and keep the crooked frame, the blur and the grain; never retouch.
- Let subjects see their pictures and veto what is shown; build the work as a sequence, not single trophies.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.
- The flash reaches only what is near it, so shadows and background fall to black.
- Leave the lamps’ own colour in: do not correct sodium orange, tungsten amber or fluorescent green.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows with no fill at all that fall to pure black with no detail, so parts of the subject disappear.
- Shape & form
- Light from the camera’s own position (an on-camera flash, a ring light, a frontal softbox) fills every hollow, so faces and objects look flat, with little shape.
- Highlights
- Small, bright glints where the light reflects off wet, oily or polished surfaces: glistening food, dewy skin, the sparkle of jewellery or chrome.
How the style is lit
- Direct on-camera flash at night in flats, bars, clubs and taxis, the background falling to black.
- Available tungsten, lamp and window light in bedrooms and bathrooms, pushed to its limit.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- Then
- 35–50 mm · f/2.8–f/8 · 1/125–1/30 s · ISO 200–800 on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look.
- White balance
- Daylight-balanced slide and negative film; flash-lit faces stay near true colour, while tungsten lamps in bedrooms and bars are left orange (inferred).
- Focal length
- Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
- Angle
- The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
- Distance
- Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
- Crop & fill
- The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
- Instant
- A casual, unplanned instant, taken quickly.
Direct
Hardly posed: friends and lovers lie in bed, sprawl on sofas, floors and back seats, hold and kiss each other, or look straight back at the photographer they trust, unsmiling or caught mid-feeling; some sleep, cry or turn away. At parties they play up to the camera, and some pictures are set up with friends in chosen clothes and places.
- Body position
- Lying down or propped on an elbow: on a sofa, the grass, the sand or the floor. Slouched, sprawled, cross-legged or perched on a step, an armrest or the floor.
- Head & gaze
- Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye.
- Line & energy
- Loose and unforced, as people stand and sit when they forget the camera, whether caught or coaxed by prompts.
- Several people
- People holding, hugging, kissing, leaning on or carrying one another.
- The moment
- People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
- With the sitter
- An insider’s view of friends, lovers and family.
Style the set
Nobody is styled by the photographer: people wear their own clothes, club and drag outfits, wigs and party make-up, in their own unmade beds, bathrooms, bars and taxis with the mess left in; a few daylight pictures put friends in chosen clothes in a chosen place.
- Clothes
- What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture. Outfits the wearers put together to be seen, designer labels included: layering, sneakers, statement pieces.
- Set & props
- A real home, workplace or street that belongs to the people in it, not a set, with their own things and traces of use.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Colour
- Strong, dense colours. An overall yellow, orange or red cast.
- Film
- A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed. Transparencies: dense, saturated colour. Printed colour negatives: soft, forgiving colour.
- Texture
- Film grain or noise you can see at normal size.
- Post-production
- Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
- Shown as
- Pictures made and shown as a set.
- Shown in
- The book as the main form of the work.
Stay away from deadpan, studio backdrop, soft studio light, large-format sheet film, heavy retouching, composite & montage, glamour & aspiration, butterfly light and pristine & spotless.
Before you shoot it
These are real, often vulnerable people photographed by someone they trusted: drug use, illness, violence, sex and nudity among friends, and a 1990s fashion offshoot criticised as 'heroin chic'. Instead photograph your own consenting adult friends, let them veto what is shown, credit them, and never show minors in intimate or nude scenes.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- Jimmy Paulette & Misty in a Taxi, NYC , Nan Goldin, 1991. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Couple in Bed, Chicago, from the series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency , Nan Goldin, 1977. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
With other styles
Pairs with Y2K digicam and flash revival. The digicam revival takes this flash-lit closeness into phone-era nights out; borrow its date stamp and digital grain only if the intimacy stays real.
Pairs with New York street photography. Take the street photographer's speed and tilted frame indoors, among people who know you.
The opposite: Düsseldorf School of Photography. Its distant, deadpan large-format view is the opposite: when in doubt, move closer and stay involved.
The opposite: Hollywood glamour portraiture. Glamour lighting perfects the face; here the flash flattens it and keeps every flaw, which is the point.
Sources
- The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Sexual_Dependency (photographs 1979–86, 1985 Whitney Biennial slideshow, 1986 Aperture book, over 700 images, friends in the Lower East Side drug scene, snapshot aesthetic, influence and 'heroin chic')
- Nan Goldin, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin (Ballad mostly indoors at night with flash, 'it's all flash-lit'; a 'diary I let people read'; 'this is my party'; subjects' veto; Larry Clark's Tulsa as model; Cibachrome prints)
- Snapshot aesthetic, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_aesthetic (harsh flash, poor framing and blur; dominant in 1990s youth fashion magazines such as The Face; Goldin, Tillmans, McGinley)
- Wolfgang Tillmans, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Tillmans (snapshot-like portraits of friends in i-D, Spex and Interview; Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees, 1992; half of his work staged; rejects the 'diaristic' label; Contax 50 mm SLR; Turner Prize 2000)
- Corinne Day, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinne_Day (Diary, 2000, her friends taking drugs and having sex; The Third Summer of Love, The Face, July 1990; withdrawal after the heroin chic debate)
- Ryan McGinley, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_McGinley (The Kids Are Alright, 1999; Whitney solo show 2003; friends; Yashica T4 and Leica R8 on 35 mm)
- Juergen Teller, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juergen_Teller ('amateur' aesthetic; Marc Jacobs campaigns; commissioned and personal work blurred, Go-Sees)
- SFMOMA collection records for Nan Goldin, Couple in Bed, Chicago (91.501) and Jimmy Paulette & Misty in a Taxi, NYC (94.158): https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.158/ (dates, dye destruction prints, sizes)
- Wolfgang Tillmans, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Tillmans (snapshot-like portraits of friends; a Contax 50 mm SLR)
- Ryan McGinley, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_McGinley (Yashica T4 and Leica R8 on 35 mm film)
- Yashica T4, Camera-wiki.org: https://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Yashica_T4 (Carl Zeiss Tessar 35 mm f/3.5; integrated flash; programmed shutter 1 s to 1/700 s; DX-coded film speeds ISO 50–3200)
- Nan Goldin, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin (The Ballad mostly indoors at night with flash, 'it's all flash-lit'; colour slides projected as a slideshow; Cibachrome prints)