Street photography for introverts is a series of photographs captured over the year 2020 from my 2019 15" Macbook.
After discovering the masses of publicly available webcam live streams I became obsessed with voyeuristically watching. I started to notice interesting moments, beautiful coincidences and images worth saving.
I started to screenshot different moments throughout, having to navigate the potential for lag, streaming dropout, and network issues, alongside the fleeting nature of the moments themselves. At any moment the camera itself could rotate, and my opportunity would vanish. It started to become a sport to get the pictures I wanted at the right moment, and the images I collected were a mixture of happenstance, trial and error and fortuitous chance.
It seemed to me to be very similar to street photography, being in the public space, the influence of chance, but without the high stakes risk of confrontation. In some ways the outcome is 'truer' than that of traditional street photography, as in street photography, the observer or photographer is present in the same space, and as a result the photographer, the camera, has a distorting effect on the scene and subject.
From my position high up on the buildings of 'Dam square, or in the nook of a beach cafe, behind rocks in an aquarium, I was hidden by the mundanity of my presence, the ubiquity of the form of CCTV, and unabaited by fear of confrontation or intimmidation. What is captured is therefore un-disturbed, un warped by the deforming presence of a lens, its unstaged representations of the modern street.
