The woman with the pushchair and with – what appears to be – the head of a rabbit, is looking straight at the camera. In the same instant, the man to her right (our left) shields his eyes against the sun. It is an in-the-moment shot at once surreal and yet remarkably everyday. Yes, we can see it is a rabbit mask, and she has a child in the pushchair, but the way she is turned to face the photographer hints at something, somehow, otherworldly. At once an image on the edge of ‘Alice In Wonderland’, and a photograph of everyday London?
Copyright ⓒ Darran K Roper
“At this point we were 15 minutes into a 30 minute conversation, when I saw the giant rabbit,” Street photographer Darran K Roper remembered the moment as he was in discussion with a member of the Hare Krishna faith. “ I think she is trying to look around us and down the road. But, the way the lady pauses looking down the street is what grabbed me, and of course giant rabbits are always fair game.”
In another shot a woman on the street has been swallowed up by her own personal parallel universe, while a man, stooped with an arched back – his thumbs holding his lapels – wanders into frame.
Copyright ⓒ Darran K Roper
“That is one of my favourite spots…Oxford Circus,” The street photographer says enthusiastically. “I don’t think it worked for me the way I wanted it to work, but it was all right. There were a few things happening here. One of my hooks is the man in the far distance, and the woman that is sitting down. She looked really sad, really solemn. At the point where she looked up I…thought she was crying as well, she really was sad, she wasn’t there, she was totally somewhere else. I was really hooked by her. I would have carried on going as close as I could, but I noticed on the right, this man. He was another character and a stronger character, and he had a kind of low bent walk to him, so everything changed.”
In his work, Roper, hints at a two world theory of street photography art. On the one hand there is the street photographer scanning, their senses heightened and zoned in on what is happening around them. Meanwhile their potential subjects are moving through the streets, mostly oblivious to the noise around them, locked on to their own reality driven existence and what is happening in it at that particular moment.
On the street this becomes a real and near surreal crossover as the world of the street photographer crashes with the world of their subject. The extraordinary emerging from the ordinary and mundane rush of the everyday. That split second capture of the psychological, political, socio-economic slice of ‘now’.
“What gets me about photography, when I talk about time machines, and looking at real powerful images is that they say something to you,” He continues. “They translate – whether it be the emotion evoking emotion or you react to it. It could be humour, it could be anything. It affects you, and I think when you are on the other side of the camera and you are trying to find something… that makes you feel a certain way, it has got to be a statement of some type. I guess by that I mean a statement that makes you feel different to the noise. Everything else is happening around you… forcing you into the now because its strong. When I find something I am moved by, something that pulls me in, that’s the statement that’s the thing that stands out.”
So, are street photographers out there focused on capturing a slice of reality while moving between multiple worlds which can throw up the extraordinary on any given day at any given time?
Copyright ⓒ Darran K Roper
On April 24, at the Holybrook Gallery, Reading Public Library, Darran’s first solo exhibition ‘Fragments of Sight’ opened. He is surprisingly downbeat about his own work which many regard as having that certain point of captivation that we expect from a top level street photographer.
“I hope that someone would find some of the images interesting, or at least one of them interesting and that there is something in there, and they get transported,” He tells me modestly. “Be great if someone came to the exhibition and got transported by one of the images that would be brilliant that would be a total success. I think that the exhibition for me over time is a chance to work out why I am doing it, and what it is that I want.”
Copyright ⓒ Darran K Roper
He scatters words, in reference to his street photography around like confetti. He wants to find a ‘statement’ in his work, he wants the viewer to be ‘transported’, and has been known to refer to photographs as ‘time machines’. An intriguing, obviously talented man.
As a street photographer, as any street photographer will know, the search for that great shot often ends in disappointment, Darran K Roper is no different.
Copyright ⓒ Darran K Roper
“Just the way she was standing,” He says of a pair of well formed legs he once captured at a train platform. “(She was) In the pose and the colours, and just at that time the train was pulling in. I probably took three shots and I was lucky when the train pulled in at the right time. That was the second one and… it kind of worked I think the contrast and I think there is a slight blur on the tube as well – so it was a lucky one in a sense. I hadn’t found a photo that day, I was a bit p’d off to be honest and I usually put my camera away. You are exploring all this time and when you switch off – okay I am going now – it’s over. But on that day I hadn’t, and I was just a bit forlorn and then all these things came together and I was elated because it was all worthwhile. There have been a few of those where actually nothing has happened and nothing has worked and on your way home something just does.”
There is a lesson to be learned here. Persistence pays.
Copyright ⓒ Darran K Roper
Darran is now looking at working exclusively in colour. It won’t matter, however, this is thoughtful well framed work fromtop level street photographer. At once intriguing, sometimes near surreal,
but always captivating frames of existence.
Vist Darran’s website a Darran Roper
Comment
Nice images, funnily enough I just took a sturdy pair of legs in bright red shoes on street in Glasgow the other day! The light was amazing.