Female street photographers on their art: 'It's about being in the present'
In 2019, New York photographer Barbara Jane Levine was walking in midtown Manhattan when she saw a snapworthy opportunity: a woman with unusually retro red hair, standing at the corner of 5th Avenue and 43rd Street.
“The woman had a perfect upswept hairdo, similar to the way my grandmother wore her hair with hairspray and bobby pins,” recalls the photographer.
Levine took the photo and in a matter of seconds, the woman was gone. “It’s an image of a fleeting moment, which I observe with no other intent other than to memorialize the scene,” said Levine, who calls the photo Red Upsweep.
It’s on the cover of a new book called Women Street Photographers, which came out earlier this month with Prestel Publishing. It showcases 100 female photographers who shoot on the streets, pounding the pavement for their best shots, from Paris to Pakistan and beyond. Edited by Gulnara Samoilova, who founded the Women Street Photographers website and Instagram account, it showcases women who captured some of the most memorable fleeting moments in time.
“I like to think street photography brings the people together,” said Samoilova. “The more work I see, the more I realize we are only at the beginning of a journey into the female gaze. The more men and women see the world through women’s eyes, the more humanizing and relatable we become to one another, despite our differences.”
It shows that there’s more to street photography than men such as Bill Cunningham, Joel Meyerowitz or Henri-Cartier Bresson, that their often overlooked female counterparts are
long past due for the spotlight. Women have been shooting on the streets since photography was popularized in the 19th century.
Documentaries, feature films and large-scale exhibitions have been quietly honoring female photographers, like Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a nanny who took over 150,000 pictures over her lifetime, or the recent retrospective and book of Helen Levitt, who documented the streets of New York during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This book features the latest crop of female street photographers, women of all ages, disciplines and nationalities, including Danielle L Goldstein, who photographed a person walking through an underground metro system in New York City from behind. The photo is a combination of what she hopes to capture, both the dull and frenetic moments of city life.
“Each singular being has a story to tell,” said Goldstein. “The camera is transformational; it emboldens and energizes me in a way that nothing else can.” Though she has photographed all over the world, Goldstein does her best work in her home city. “Out of familiarity, comes deeper understanding and emotion,” she said. “This photograph reflects a particular time in my life when I felt quite alone. And yet, one can never be entirely alone in this city.”
Another photo in the book is by Nina Kling, who shot a man crossing Madison Avenue with smoke covering his face. “Street photography is about being in the present,” said Kling. “I love observing people and the challenge of organizing the visual clutter of a busy city into a single, split-second frame while being immersed in everyday life, that is, capturing and documenting the now.”
Hamburg-based photographer Elena Alexandra took a photo she calls Sleeping Beauty, which is in the book, depicting a woman in red sleeping peacefully on a train. “This photo is very special to me,” she said. She snapped it on a train from Hamburg to Odense, Denmark, in 2019. “My head and heart were full of dark thoughts and feelings,” said Alexandra. “I felt sad, heartbroken and weak. But in the gloom, I noticed the girl in red sleeping opposite to me. Something inside of me said: ‘Take a picture!’”
Alexandra took the photo. A few weeks later, it became her most successful yet, winning her awards and being included in many exhibitions.
“That positive resonance gave me encouragement to live through the sad time I was having but the most inspiring was the lesson I learned from it,” said Alexandra. “Life can be a gloomy place sometimes, but even in these moments there is a light inside of me that will guide me out of the darkness, if I am brave enough to follow it.
Among the other highlights in the book, there are photos of portraits, group shots, street scenes and closeups. In one, a hand is captured under stark sunlight by Michelle Groskopf, in such a gentle pose, it could be mistaken for a Michelangelo painting. In another, a fleet of birds fly above a shadowy figure by Dimpy Bhalotia, shot from below. Street style is the focus of two stylish dandies shot by Dominique Mishrahi, wearing fur coats and sunglasses, while Efrat Sela captures a group of men crawling over a modern piece of architecture. To Levine, each photo is a diary of the moment. “Oftentimes, these candid images on the streets are reminders of parts of my life that are locked away within my mind, or those which were simply forgotten,” she said.
It’s also a map of her explorations, urban adventures, as a photographer. “New York has been a place that I can wander the streets relatively inconspicuously and feel as if I am part of a bigger society,” Levine said. “The simple pleasure of observing both mundane and exotic moments feed my continual desire to explore neighborhoods and places that are outside my day to day.”
Women Street Photographers is out now
desires for whatever we might expect of a film’s story and hand it over to her. Sometimes she would chase after sounds that we couldn’t hear or smells that we couldn’t smell. It was just a process of letting go and trying to immerse.”
After a night of filming, Lo would strap on small GPS devices so that she could find her again the next day. Still more challenging was the gap of almost a year in the middle of filming. Everyone
outside of Istanbul thought that she wouldn’t survive long on the streets – but Lo found her within a couple of days of returning to the city. Even now, a couple of years after she finished production, her friends in Istanbul are still sending her pictures of Zeytin and Nazar whenever they see them.
She hopes that the film will make people reflect on our double standards when it comes to dogs in the west. She is disturbed by the internet – and the lockdown-driven vogue for pure-bred dogs : “Have these pet owners stopped to consider where the mother of their beloved is, how much she has suffered in breeding facilities?” However, she thinks that pet ownership can be a gateway to empathy with other species, noting that in California, pet owners vote in far greater numbers for animal-welfare measures. And she hopes that the film will make us question our assumptions.
“We thinkthat we treat dogs better in the west. But really the fact that New York, London, LA don’thave dogs on the street is indicative of how intolerant we actually are. Unless a dog is property, it has no rights at all. Which is insane if you think about it. We’ve somehow reframed the insanity of killing millions of dogs every year or letting them languish in cells as the moral thing to do when in fact it’s the opposite.”
In Istanbul, she says, she was able to have fulfilling relationships with animals that weren’t based on ownership – and has missed it ever since. “John Berger writes: maybe the impulse to go to the zoo is to fulfil this desire that is so lacking in our modern existence. It’s in our blood to be with other species and to communicate with them. The experience in Turkey showed me what I’d been missing in the cultures I’d grown up in, where the streets are devoid of other species. That’s such an impoverished way to go through the world.”
• Stray is available to preview on www.stray-film.co.uk to celebrate National Puppy Day on March 23, ahead of its digital release on March 26
ures are presumed straight until proven otherwise. “Also, I wasn’t making a biopic!” says the sparkly-eyed 51-yearold, who has an immense grey beard in which woodland creatures could frolic unnoticed for days.
Several of Anning’s finds can be seen at the Natural History Museum in London, though comparatively little is known about her. “One description I found said she was warm and friendly and good with children,” says Lee. “The other described her as grumpy and miserable, and said she had a dirty shop. That was it.” His script, and Winslet’s performance, follow the second description, although things warm up gradually after Charlotte – a younger woman of higher social standing, played by Saoirse Ronan – enters the picture.
Lee considers himself an outsider. “There just aren’t that many queer working-class people in the film industry,” he says. So he was taken aback to be informed that he shouldn’t tell lesbian stories. “It’s been a real lesson for me in identity politics. I know I can’t talk for Mary because I’m not a 19th-century palaeontologist, but I do think I can talk with her. What I tried to do was to take this working-class woman, who hadn’t been recognised in her lifetime, and elevate her. I wanted to contextualise her in terms of a relationship. And because men had blocked and overlooked her, and reappropriated her work for themselves, I felt that this relationship couldn’t be with a man.”
Gay, rural, working-class love stories are Lee’s speciality. God’s Own Country, his exhilarating 2017 debut, was “about two queer lads on the side of a hill in Yorkshire in bad weather”. But while Lee, like Johnny in that movie, is a farmer’s son, he says it is Ammonite rather than its predecessor that represents the nearest he has come to self-portraiture. “Like Mary, I have found it very difficult to find my voice, professionally and personally. I feel very closed a lot of the time. I find it hard to be me, and to be truthful about me.” The networking side of the film industry is one he finds especially traumatic. “It makes me want to die,” he says.
Success hasn’t helped. “It amplifies the discomfort and has caused issues for me. You go somewhere like a dinner party – listen to me, a dinner party! – and people want to talk about your work. Sometimes, I want people to talk to me as Francis, not Francis who made some films.” Would he liketo feel more at ease socially? Or is he content to chisel away quietly at his work, the way Mary does with her fossils? He gazes out of the window, to the hill where God’s Own Country was shot. Five seconds pass, then six, then seven. Eventually, he gives a little growl, as if annoyed with himself.
“I don’t want to cry, Ryan,” he says. “I lead a very, very lonely life. I would like to be part of a group, or part of … something.” His films concern introverted figures who feel unseen until they find a lover. Has that been his experience? Another thoughtful pause. “I think I’ve had some near misses. But not as yet.”
His isolation began in childhood. “My parents worked all the time and weren’t around. The animals were my friends.” Was it upsetting when those friends were slaughtered? “No, because you understand when you grow up with livestock that there’s always going to be dead stock. And it’s an economy, in the same way that Mary sells her most precious fossils to put food on the table.”
At first, he was content on the farm: “The hills and the woods were my playground.” Growing up, and realising he was gay, brought its own problems. “Like many queer people in rural places, I left to try to find my tribe, my family.” His comprehensive school had not led him to expect much from life. “One teacher asked us: ‘Has anyone shown you how to fill out your DSS and housing benefit forms? Because you’ll need those once you leave.’”
Nevertheless, he got into drama school in London, then spent 15 years as a jobbing actor. “A really bad one. I always wanted to tell stories but the frustration came from not understanding how somebody from my background, with my lack of privilege, could do that.”
Along the way, he met two heroes. Victoria Wood wrote a tiny part for him in her sitcom Dinnerladies, while Mike Leigh cast him in a small role in his Gilbert and Sullivan extravaganza TopsyTurvy. He remembers Leigh, who remains a friend, telling him how good he was. “I don’t think I could ever believe it for myself,” he says. “Acting was pretty shaming. I always felt I’d let people down.”
It is a sensation he never has as a director, where he feels “very focused and blinkered and immersed”, overseeing every detail obsessively. “It makes my brain hurt. It’s terrifying and incredibly satisfying.”
Queer stories tend to include scenes of homophobia or coming out, but not his. “For me, it was about trying to take the difficulty away from sexuality, and to look at the difficulty of relationships.” The nearest thing Lee had to a coming out of his own occurred when he was 30. “I was going through a hard time in a relationship. I was back in Yorkshire, and my dad could tell something was up. We were in the barn and he said to me, ‘Are you all right?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m in love, Dad, and it’s with a man, not a woman.’ And I cried. And he held me for a bit, then just said, ‘You’re mine. And I love you.’”
That scene would never make it into one of Lee’s films. His taste is for the frugal. Any dialogue is squeezed out as if from a nearly empty toothpaste tube. He is proud of God’s Own Country: it is absolutely the film he meant to make. But he would be happier if he could remove two words from the soundtrack. When Johnny is bathing his father, who has suffered a stroke, the older man clasps his son’s hand and says: “Thank you.”
You thought the hand clasp was enough? “I did.” But you wrote those words? “I did.” Then why didn’t you cut them? “Because a very brilliant executive at the BFI, Mary Burke, kept going, ‘It resonates, people will find the emotion in it.’ I said, ‘They’ll find the emotion in the hand!’ She was like, ‘Just keep it in!’”
Pressed on the matter, Lee admits that Ammonite contains several doorknobs that don’t pass muster. Though correct for the period, they are not precisely the sort that would have been seen in the bedrooms of a Georgian or early Victorian house. When he noticed them on set, there wasn’t time to arrange replacements. “I had to let it go. But it bugged me.” And they’re visible? “Yeah.” Would you remove them if you could? “I would take them out, yeah.”
The laughter that has been building inside him for the past few moments bubbles over now. “Don’t write about that, Ryan!” he groans. “People are going to think I’m insane!” Perhaps. Or it might just make them love his films even more.
Ammonite is available on digital formats in the UK from 26 March.
I said: 'I’m in love, Dad, and it’s with a man.’ And I cried. He held me then just said: ‘You’re mine. And I love you'