Sixty minutes goes quickly when life happens. So quick it almost feels like a tenth of the time. Just three thousand, six hundred seconds. But a lot can happen and a lot can change in the window of time, particularly when there are thousands of lives passing through one small district of one capital city on an island in a continent somewhere in the world.
The well dressed for business become the well dressed for dancing, and dancing is what we do with one another, in some way, as the commuters two-step with the convivial. Never has the clashing of daily life been more pronounced than the hour in which day turns into night and never is it more pronounced than in a place like Soho.
I took a slow walk through the neighbourhood as I made my way to my tube to make my way to the station to make my way home. As with most street photographers, a walk that should be15 minutes can take four times as long and the most direct route is not the one we tread and this walk was no different. I meandered through the main streets, stopping by the tourist traps, diverting to interesting nooks, all while pausing at street corners.
These walks are what makes street photography in cities so special. Feeling lost within familiar streets is a strange occurance. But that's what happens, because you're not focussed on where you're going and you're not worried about how you get there, you care instead about what you see on the way and it creates a conflicting scenario whereby you both are blind to your surroundings while also seeing them with more clarity than the average person.
I have mentioned before, in my Red Light District project how much I love the energy of Soho at night and that remains true, but there is something extra special about the the place during the transference of the state of time due to the myriad of human life you find compacted into the same space. The after-work drinkers mix with the family-mealers and the out-of-towners and the party-goers and the dance begins.
This collection of images aims to convey this dance. The moments of each of those demographics swaying through Soho streets, sliding through open doors and shimmying between crowds. I've said before about setting projects. And sometimes that project could be capturing a particular colour, or location or even a certain gesture, like Monaris' 'Collecting Hands', but this was was a project about time. Not just the passing of it from day to night, but the limit of it.
Sixty minutes to city capture life as its truest. Just three thousand, six hundred seconds to try and find a way to illustrate how we're so all so similar but all so different.
