A couple of months ago I was a part of a program at school called the Getty Master Class and the program involved a couple of other colleges where students produce photographic works based on a particular photographer, style or medium of photography. This particular program was based around the work of Japanese photographer Mikiko Hara.
Mikiko Hara is a street photographer that shoots mainly shoots medium format analog film. 6x6 frame to be specific although she has shot different formats throughout her career. Her style of shooting is quite interesting. She owns a vintage Zeiss Ikon camera that has a very small viewfinder. So small that she doesn't even use it to frame her photos. She shoots "from the hip" which means that instead of looking through a camera's viewfinder to compose a photo, she has a pre-set focus (on her all manual camera no less), and with this focus in her mind, she just shoots what her eyes fancy. It's a bit of a prayer when you shoot like this. With digital cameras, if you don't like the photo while shooting in this style, you can easily delete it but when you're shooting with film, you see and keep your mistakes. When it doesn't work, it doesn't work but when it does work, it really works. As students, after seeing her photographs based in this style of photography, they look amazing but I'm quite sure, as she stated in her lecture at the Getty Museum, she also had a great deal of photos that didn't work. We just never got to see those.
When we set off to shoot photographs for this project, I was inspired and decided to go about it the purist way and that was to shoot on film, medium format and from the hip. So as I was shooting, I walked around the streets of Los Angeles with my camera around my neck with a pre-set focus and snapped frames with what I thought would make for great street photographs and I would hope that I caught something brilliant. I've shot from the hip before on numerous occasions but I used toy cameras and I didn't really care much whether I got something workable or not (the reason behind that is a different story which I may get into somewhere down the line) but the concept isn't alien to me.
This particular frame was a mistake. I shot 6x6 medium format which is a square frame (6x6 = 1:1) but when my lab developed and scanned the roll, this particular frame was cut in half which is a shame but the image works. It was taken at Placita Olivera during Dia de los muertos festivities and I shot a photo of a woman with her face traditionally painted during this festival along with her son who didn't have his face painted. Sadly this photo didn't make the cut for the Getty Master Class. I developed the roll well after the deadline to submit work.
"Dia de los muertos as a family" / 6x6 medium format Arista Edu Ultra 400 / November 2014