Craig Whitehead
Under his Sixstreetunder handle, Cambridge-based Craig has become one of Britain’s leading street photographers. He teaches workshops with Skill Share, and he is working on a follow-up to his first sold-out photobook, New York. Explore more of Craig’s work at www.instagram.com/sixstreetunder and purchase prints via www.sixstreetunder.com.
IT’S STRANGE to think, now that he has amassed more than 250,000 Instagram followers, but Craig Whitehead only turned to street photography by chance. The Cambridge School of Art graduate picked up a camera purely as a creative outlet during his lunch breaks from work, while even his specialist subject came about by necessity. ‘The only option was to shoot the city because that’s where I happened to be,’ Craig explains. ‘If I had been based in the countryside, I’d probably be a landscape photographer.’
Craig’s only real experience of street photography at that stage was the unflattering flashgun portraiture of Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden. He tried imitating a similar style, shooting wide and close, yet quickly realised this was not for him. ‘I’m not going to stick my camera in someone’s face while they’re biting into a burger, it doesn’t interest me,’ he says. ‘I’m definitely more in the camp of trying to make art.’
During his degree, Craig used multiple sheets of tracing paper to carefully build his illustrations and he takes a similarly layered approach to street photography. Rather than focusing purely on people, he is more interested in the scene as a whole, so he will select interesting backdrops or objects to shoot through first, before identifying repeat patterns of behaviour that allow him to pre-empt how figures might enter into the frame.
He views the process as a numbers game – and he fancied his odds better with a camera. ‘You could work for a week on a couple of illustrations and hate everything you’ve done; whereas I can take 1,000 photos in a day and it doesn’t matter if I don’t use 999 of them,’ he explains.
That matter-of-fact attitude extends to editing and an approach that might alarm photojournalistic purists: Craig thinks nothing of removing unwanted details that have strayed into shot, like wires or bag straps. There’s a similar amount of artistic licence used in colour grading, as he pushes the saturation and often skews reds towards the slight orange-bias of Kodachrome film. The avoidance of what he calls ‘known colours’ is the key to preventing pictures from looking false or overly worked. ‘It’s the skin tones that give it away,’ he explains. ‘If people like blue highlights, you can tell as soon as you see a face in there. But you can play around with colour a lot if you protect those indicators.’
Craig agrees that his appetite for street photography is bordering on an addiction and it is clear that he has been suffering withdrawal symptoms. ‘In the past 18 months, I just haven’t been producing,’ he admits. ‘It sucks. That feeling of just surprising yourself and getting a shot that you never expected is the entire reason to keep going out and doing it, so not having any of that for the best part of two years is awful. I’ve had to accept that everyone is in this same situation, it’s not just me.’
The extended lay-off has given Craig time to reassess his practice. He cites Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas as the ‘Old Masters’, and he is keen to emulate their broader interpretation of the subject. ‘Why am I pigeon-holing myself completely to street?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘They didn’t think like that, they just shot what they wanted – especially Haas. People hold him up as one of the street photography masters, but half of his work doesn’t even have anyone in the frame. It’s just beautiful art.’
Suitably inspired, Craig intends to adopt a more generally creative approach, trying his hand at different subjects and alternative techniques, like multiple exposures. ‘It’s a good time to refresh and experiment,’ he says, that addiction showing no sign of abating.