Street Photography — Photography by Bill Nash: street, California, Venice Beach, destinations, pacific ocean, Los Angeles, New York, skating, skate park, Las Vegas.
People are easier to anonymize than buildings, and buildings are just as much characters in any city as the people are. With street photography, I'm always looking for something that tells a little story, something my brain will just start to spool out to fill in the blanks. Who the person is usually doesn't matter, and half the time I don't even know. I'm looking for little slices of life, but I don't want to intrude on them while I'm doing it. I think with silhouettes, it's easier for the viewer to imagine themselves in the setting, to step outside their own story, the same way I might when I'm looking at the scene.
Awareness of the camera always changes the scene, and I'm not exactly stealthy with a DSLR and 70-200mm lens. So I can get the faces if I want to, and I'd be losing a certain amount of emotion or expression, as well as identity. I like works that feel immersive. I frame my landscapes to pull the viewer into the space, and with street work I want to put the viewer there as well, but I think a silhouette is like a cutout of sorts. “Insert self here.”
She's a brilliant street artist I would see on the regular when I wandered Fremont Street late at night. She's always friendly and warm, even amongst that zoo of people in various stages of mastering Drunkenese. Going from street life to street portraiture isn't much of a change, it's still wild and unplanned, and I enjoy that.
The Wiltern is a chunk of history standing proud, doing its thing. The Palazzo shot was mid-Covid shutdown, that had turned the Las Vegas strip into a ghost town. Not even the pickpockets were out. Very different scenes and times, very different night walks.
Wrong or right doesn't really matter. I'm not doing journalism, strictly speaking. If I wanted the real story, I'd talk to the people. Sometimes I do. I've a shot in my collection of a very pregnant woman giving me the stinkeye while she drags on a cigarette. So sometimes I don't.