Phillip and Mathew, Crossing South, Blackfriars Bridge, London 2008 ©Nick Turpin
Birger, Crossing South, Blackfriars Bridge, London 2007
©Nick Turpin
Trevor, Crossing North, Blackfriars Bridge, London 2007
©Nick Turpin
These images were kindly sent to me by Sarah Ewing on behalf of Nick Turpin. They are culled from his on going project, The Bridge, an interesting visual survey of the users of Blackfriars Bridge, London.
Turpin´s work is, and always has been, about the essence of photography; catching the instant. In the most naive sense, photography is just a tool that allows us to be curious. Yet the biggest challenge of street photography is to observe these moments of life and seek out beauty in a chance encounter, a surreal juxtaposition or a rare emotion and then quickly but quietly snatch it from reality with the camera whilst remaining invisible to the passing crowds, an art which Nick Turpin has championed for years. More recently however, Turpin has slightly changed his approach to using public spaces by manipulating them with the view to creating more concept driven work. Of his project, he says:
"I have decided to meet the actors, selecting interesting strangers in the streets and isolating them from the crowd for a few minutes in order to shine my interrogating lights on them. Each series of pictures is a social survey, a photographic census of a place or a type. The Bridge series is made on a bridge over London's river Thames, an exposed location that gives no cover to my subjects who find themselves isolated like microbes on a microscope slide. We don't expect to be singled out in a city the size of London, I am sure everyone I approach thinks they are about to be mugged and in a way they are."Nick Turpin began his photography career in 1990, at the age of 21, by landing a job as a staff photographer for The Independent. Since 1997 he has been shooting design and advertising projects for clients around the world including Toyota, Jaguar, Land Rover, VW, IBM, Barclays Bank, Vodafone and Sony. In 2000 he founded the international street photographers group iN-PUBLIC which has led to lecturing and teaching street photography at London's Tate Modern, Yale School of Art and on TV.
