For over seven years Steve Marshall has photographed Sydney streets, almost every morning and afternoon. This short series is from that project.
My appreciation of street photography is of the classic style and I apply myself with a deliberate approach to the subject. My work falls into both documentary and street genres although my style fits into neither category exclusively. The photographs have a personal feel, whether it’s of humour or a political or social statement, every image is a considered statement; about banality, or commitment, perseverance or just being. At times I focus on a métier (the occupation), at other times, though not often, it will be the physiognomy (the face), of a subject. I concentrate mostly on the opposing social forces or concepts of the subject in its environment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka have influenced my photography. In literature I have been inspired by the literary genius of Samuel Beckett and John Steinbeck. More recently the Magnum photographers, Alex Webb, David Alan Harvey, Bruno Barbey and Trent Park, all of whom I have worked with, have influenced me both personally and professionally.
Those influences are evident in this body of work, captured in the mornings and afternoons over the last seven years that reveal Martin Place and Hunter Street in the Sydney CBD. As the seasons come and go, the angles change, it’s lighter, or darker, people responding to change in the environment, the season, and to life. I think of it as the angle of darkness.
City. Street. is about hope and desire and reality and truth, scepticism and certainty in the fragile and tenacious balance and pace of life. It’s also about my savage curiosity to observe – to capture an essence of what I feel the subject is enduring as they march through and about the shelter of civilisation.
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