The people person
Trying to tell a country’s story in portraits is no mean feat, but it’s what Niall McDiarmid has set out to do – with great success. Ailsa McWhinnie finds out more
Street photography tips from Niall McDiarmid
Photographers frequently go to great lengths to capture their images. Some camp on the sides of mountains in the middle of winter, driven by the desire to photograph the first chink of light as it breaks over a remote landscape. Others risk their safety to travel to inhospitable climates in pursuit of rare wildlife. Then there are those who have made their living from photographing war zones, where the risks so often outweigh the rewards. Why is it, then, that the simple act of approaching an ordinary, unthreatening human going about their everyday business, and asking to take their portrait, is enough to strike terror into even the boldest photographer’s heart?
‘Every single one is an absolute nightmare,’ laughs Niall McDiarmid. This, despite him having spent the best part of the past 10 years travelling the length and breadth of Great Britain, stopping people in the street and asking if he can take their picture. We’re chatting over a coffee and croissant in the garden of a Clapham café. Having spent my journey to London looking at the images in his book Town to Town, which was published earlier this year, by the time I get off the train I’m ‘seeing’ his distinctive images everywhere. They are in the young woman wearing the floral trousers who’s standing in a diagonal shaft of light, and in another whose green coat echoes the colour of the passing Southern Railway carriages.
Niall’s move into street portraiture was triggered by the financial crash of 2008. Prior to that, he was a busy freelance photographer, but as austerity kicked in, commissions gradually slowed and family life with his wife and three sons took over. He gave up his studio to spend more time at home. Then, after a couple of years, a switch flicked. ‘I suddenly needed to get out and take more pictures for myself,’ he recalls. ‘I wanted to go back to where I started with photography back in the 1990s.’ And that place was out on the streets. As his wife was at home on Fridays, this became his day for photography. So he headed out into his home area, Clapham, before gradually setting his sights further afield.
‘For the first few weeks, there wasn’t much behind it,’ he explains. ‘But after a while I realised there was little point
in going out and simply taking pictures. I really wanted to have a style, so I decided I would shoot portraits and they would be in colour. Britain has tended to be portrayed as a rather monotone, grey place, but it’s really not like that – I’m interested in trying to make it look not quite as drab as it’s been made out to be in the past.’
Britishness in all its forms
Fairly early on in the process, Niall realised he had no desire to create a London-centric fashion blog, and had a rethink. ‘I knew I needed to look outside of London,’ he explains, ‘and I realised that nobody goes to, say, Tunbridge Wells or Guildford or Basildon to photograph people. So I told my wife that I was going to go everywhere in the country, and she rolled her eyes – she’d heard this sort of thing before. But with a bit of luck and a bit of hard work, that’s pretty much what I’ve done.’
A year later, as rumblings about the possibility of a referendum to consider the UK’s relationship with the EU began to increase in volume, Niall realised the time was right to produce a body of work that looked at Britishness in all its forms. ‘I was interested in looking at people from different backgrounds and different ethnicities, and building up a portrait of a country that way,’ he says. ‘Having said that, however, I’m not really interested in telling people’s personal stories or writing anything down – I just want people to look at the pictures, wonder who the subjects are, and leave it at that.’ Hence the captions in the book simply state the town and the date – about as minimal as it’s possible to get.
None of this means, however, that Niall feels detached from his subjects. On the contrary, he is aware of his responsibilities to them. This was brought home to him in the most acute way possible in 2017, when the Museum of London hosted an outdoor exhibition of his work and, sickeningly, some of the images were daubed in racist graffiti. ‘It wasn’t widely reported in the press at the time because I wanted to keep it quite quiet,’ he recalls. ‘However, it was incredibly hard because I wasn’t expecting it – even though I should have been, because I’ve had a bit of abuse online. The important thing, though, was that people had been incredibly kind and generous in agreeing to be photographed, and I didn’t want those who had racist graffiti sprayed on them to become some sort of “statement” for what I do.’
Wide-ranging subjects
There are those who have suggested the work can be compared to August Sander’s in some way, in that Niall is making a list of sorts. If that is what comes across, it isn’t intentional, and he’s keen to stress he doesn’t have a set plan about who he photographs. ‘I’ve never counted the number of people I’ve photographed,’ he says. ‘If you start to break things down and categorise the work, you lose some of the magic, because
‘I just want people to look at the pictures, wonder who the subjects are, and leave it at that’
then you start to think you need to photograph more of a certain type of person.’
That’s not to say he doesn’t aim to photograph a range of people. On any given day, he might find he’s made portraits of, say, two or three older people – after which he might then look for someone middle-aged, or for a person with a child. He does encounter suspicion at times, and a fair few people say no when he asks to photograph them. Recently, for example, he’s been working on a project in the West Midlands – a region known for its mixture of cultures and ethnicities. ‘ The more settled white communities are the hardest to photograph there,’ he explains. ‘I’ve found them to be very suspicious. But in some of the newer communities, the people are fine. I’ve heard that people from certain religious backgrounds don’t want to be photographed, but I haven’t found it to be that way.’
It’s all about the light
Over time, Niall has learned which parts of a town tend to bear most fruit, photographically speaking. He avoids the busy centres, where people are less likely to welcome distractions, heading instead for the ‘transitional’ areas that lie in between the bustling commercial hubs and residential streets.
And he’s not only looking for interesting people – what’s going on in the frame is equally important. There might be a block of colour, an interesting sign or a patterned doorway that can be incorporated into the image to make it more than simply a record of a human face. ‘It’s as if I have this algorithm in my mind,’ Niall says. ‘I’m looking for a person and a background, for colour and shape, and am trying to slot it all together somehow. It’s quite difficult to be specific, though, because if I see somebody and get chatting to them, I can’t then drag them half way across town just for an interesting backdrop. I make my pitch, take the shots – about seven or eight – and that’s it.’
Somewhat surprisingly, given how consistent Niall’s portraits are in terms of style, they have been shot using a wide variety of kit. He started off shooting film, moving from the fixed-lens Fuji GW670III to a Mamiya 7 and then a Leica M6. Then, he transitioned to the ‘incredible workhorse’ Canon EOS 5D system, but more recently has been shooting with the Fujifilm GFX 50S medium-format mirrorless camera, which he can happily use handheld (he never shoots with a tripod). Oh, then there’s also the Leica M10 digital rangefinder that he pulls out of his bag that’s sitting on the floor beside us. Nobody could ever accuse him of brand loyalty.
But how has he managed to achieve such a uniform style with camera gear that varies so widely? ‘ The cameras now are so good, it really comes down to the light,’ he states. ‘If you can shoot in consistent light, you can get very similar results, no matter what you’re using. I tend to shoot in flat light, as it works better, so the summer months are trickier – late spring and early autumn are the best. I’m also very keen that the pictures don’t look particularly as if they’re on film or digital, and that they’re very straightforward. I try to make it as non-defined as possible.’
To return to his first statement, at the beginning of the interview, what can people who are new to the genre do to make the experience of shooting street portraits less of a ‘nightmare’? A lot of it comes down to practice, taking a deep breath and just getting out there. As he says, ‘I’d be lying if I said it was as difficult as it was at the beginning. It’s still hard, but nowadays when I get rejected, I get over it a lot more easily. I was quite shy as a teenager, but once I hit my forties I realised I was pretty good at chatting to people. So if I were to give one piece of advice, it would be to ignore the technical side and look for what you’re good at – and in my case it’s that I’m full of blarney, as they’d say in Ireland. And you have to be kind. If you say to someone they look interesting – that perhaps you like the coat they’re wearing – but without being cheesy, a lot of the time they will say yes.’