image: Nick Turpin, iN-PUBLiC
Continuing on with our series of interviews with collectives, we are up to our eighth group. Today we look at street photography group iN-PUBLiC. Founded twenty-one years ago by street photographer Nick Turpin, iN-PUBLiC is an international collective of street photographers which has played an enormous role in the resurgence of interest in the genre in recent years.
Image: Natan Dvir, iN-PUBLiC
Initially, it aimed to promote street photography as a unique and specific approach to documenting public life, but they relaunched the iN-PUBLiC group in 2018 with a new exciting remit. Now their work questions the traditional template of street photography while respecting the integrity of the documentary photograph.
Image: Jill Maguire,iN-PUBLiC
The collective has a lot of interest from people wanting to join, receiving about eighty submissions a month. Their standards are high, so the group prefers to look out for suitable photographers to enter. Membership requires accepting that street photography is documentary in form and shunning the staging, manipulation and compositing images as inconsistent with that aim.
Image: Pau Buscato, iN-PUBLiC
Nick says the keys to a successful collective are a shared passion of the genre, an understanding and mutual respect for each other’s work and a strong leader with whom the buck stops. He advises anyone who wants to start or join a collective today that it’s a lot of work to run a group like iN-PUBLiC, and your own practice may take a back seat. However, that is offset by the enormous pleasure derived from building something greater than the sum of its parts with wonderful new connections and friendships.
Image: Nick Hannes, iN-PUBLiC
Thanks to Nick for talking to us. You can read a broader overview of all nine collectives we spoke to in our upcoming online photo magazine Head On Interactional, due to be launched during the 2021 Head On Photo Festival in November. We are excited to bring you our first edition so stay tuned!
Image: Rob Hogenbirk, iN-PUBLiC
