“Every picture I took last year was taken with a 35mm lens”
Mark Seymour wedding & street photographer
● Based in Windsor, Mark Seymour has enjoyed an award-winning career as a wedding photographer for over 30 years.
● His awards include European Wedding Photographer of the Year and the brides’ choice as MPA UK Wedding Photographer of the Year.
● A Nikon ambassador, Mark was the first UK photographer to be awarded a double fellowship for documentary photography.
● He is an experienced travel and street photography tutor, leading photo workshops throughout Asia as well as the UK and parts of Europe.
www.markseymourphotography.co.uk
When I listen to Mark Seymour on the phone, he doesn’t sound like someone who returned home less than a week ago after 75 days away travelling across Asia. There’s no sign of jet lag or fatigue as he speaks, even though he spent most of that time leading week-long street photography courses in the heat and dust of Istanbul, Myanmar, Nagaland, Assam, Varanasi and Kolkata. Although better known as one of Britain’s leading wedding photographers, the enthusiasm and energy in the man’s voice is due to his new-found love – street photography. In the last few years, Mark has built a growing reputation for his street photography courses, especially to Asia’s crowded cities, where the turn of every corner can reveal something fleeting but exciting in the way of unexpected subject matter for the camera.
It is a career diversion that fulfils his love of travel and mixing with different cultures and lifestyles. “We ran a course at each one of those locations and I’d be there two days before,” he says, explaining to me the itinerary of the trip he’s just completed. “Between five and seven people would come out and we’d do a street photography course, they’d go back and then I’d go off to the next location. We ran six courses over that period.” Clearly, Mark sees himself at a transitional point in his career. “I’m travelling around the world, going to places I want to be, so the whole focus of what I’m doing is less and less weddings and more and more of these street photography courses around the world.” One thing is sure, his future will be more about the journey than the destination of the next wedding…
So, how much wedding photography are you doing now? I probably do about 15 weddings a year. This year, we’re pushing the street photography courses. It’s more fun than weddings. You’re dealing with people who want to be there to learn, and once you’ve finished, it’s wrapped up and you move on to the next one. I’m still doing weddings and I’m still doing travel photography, but I like that because it’s nice to have income streams from multiple places.
Diversifying sounds sensible when the market is so competitive… Most of the travel courses started off in November and December, but now it’s October, November, December and this year we will probably start mid-september because it’s too hot in Asia before that anyway. We’re looking at doing a course in the middle of the year in the Himalayas and also the Venice Carnival. I’ve been doing weddings a long time and I love photography, but with street photography I’m being paid to travel around the world and go to places I want, and for me that’s more fun.
Have you always been interested in street photography, or was it something that developed later? It definitely developed later. When I was first a wedding photographer I didn’t think of street photography, but I started doing documentary photography about 12 to 15 years ago. These courses developed a few years later through Nikon when I became an ambassador and I was asked if I wanted to do any training, but I couldn’t do wedding photography because they already had someone to do that, so I did street photography. We started doing that locally and then we did one in India and it grew from there.
Your main focus appears to be Asia, why is that?
South America is on my radar and I want to go to Cuba and to Peru and other places, but I haven’t had time to recce the place first to do a course the following year. In Asia, the people are fascinating, particularly in the areas we go to, which are the slums. We’re going there because it is gritty and it’s a bit hardcore and harking 20 or 30 years behind where we are, but that’s what we want to photograph.
In Asia, the people are very friendly and quite often they invite us into their house and ask us if we want to photograph their family
How do people react to being approached by strangers with cameras?
In Asia, the people are very friendly and quite often they invite us into their house and ask us if we want to photograph their family. In this country that simply wouldn’t happen. The focus is on capturing life generally, and they have a different culture out there and it’s a very warm continent. People sit out a lot in the front of their houses and you can just walk down the street, poke your head into people’s doors and say, ‘hello’ and ‘how are you?’
There is always more everyday life going on in these streets… Yes, absolutely. There are things going on all of the time. Also, we were in India and went to one of the markets – in our country we’d have everything done mechanically, we’d have lifts going up and down, or machines taking things down from the shelves rapidly. Over in Asia, labour is so cheap that they have people doing these things still and it helps the whole economy