Street Photography: Discovering the Social Landscape
The essential question most photographers face at some point is what to photograph. One answer is to engage with the social landscape that begins at your front door — for the attentive photographer, that landscape can be alive with voices, codes, messages, and evidence of the people who have been there, interacting with each other and the built environment. When you learn to tune into these different frequencies, pictures present themselves.
What are the ways you can photograph an individual as they interact with the wider world, and how can you use light and shadow to photograph the built environment? We’ll explore strategies developed by leading photographers of the social landscape, and the tropes and motifs that have emerged from their work. Through weekly assignments, critique, discussions, and the presentation of work, students will learn to see the built environment and its inhabitants with a little more clarity, and they’ll be given tools with which to create photographs that reveal their discoveries.
Thomas Alleman was born and raised in Detroit and graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in English Literature. From that point onward he dedicated his attentions to photography. During a fifteen-year newspaper career, Tom was a frequent winner of distinctions from the National Press Photographer’s Association, as well as being named California Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1995 and Los Angeles Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1996. As a magazine freelancer, Tom’s pictures have been published regularly in Time, People, Business Week, Barrons, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Traveler.
Tom exhibited “Social Studies,” a series of street photographs, widely in Southern California. “Sunshine & Noir,” a book-length collection of black-and-white urban landscapes made in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, had its solo debut at the Afterimage Gallery in Dallas in 2006. Subsequent solo exhibitions opened around the world, and most recently “The Nature of the Beast” debuted at the 515 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2021.
allemanphoto.com
