Looking Back : Philip ‘Flip’ Collier, 50 Years of Street Photography
For me, it is a great shot.
Copyright ⓒ Philip Collier
Cinematic. Like a scene from a disaster movie. A young man on a bike riding toward an (unseen) apocalypse.
A mutant virus (imagine) has escaped from a laboratory and is being spread through the population via animals. You will never look at your pet dog the same way again (or so the promotional poster might say). The kid on the bike (could be a young Harrison Ford?) – okay maybe not – is looking anxious. He looks as if he is the only one who knows that the world will end in the next 90 minutes if he doesn’t get across town, retrieve the vaccine and stop the bug from spreading…
Isn’t that so contemporary?
“Pretty straight forward on this shot,” Street Photographer Philip Flip Collier was telling nonchalantly about the photograph he has called ‘Good Show’. A shot taken in New York City in 1975. “Rainy day on the old 42nd Street when this biker happened by. Bikers were not to common back then and now 42nd Street doesn’t resemble this anymore.”
Flip has been a street photographer now for 50 years and has a huge archive of photographs. Growing up in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and like many around this time, he spent his leisure with some awesome magazines like Life, Time and National Geographic.
“It was really an exciting time in photography,” he explained. “I loved looking through all of them and I remember thinking that, I wanted to become a photo journalist.”
Then.
“I could do that,” he said thoughtfully.
In 1972 Flip enrolled at Boston’s New England School of Photography (sadly it ceased operating in March 2020). Among the classes he took were some on street photography where he was introduced to people like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai ( the Hungarian-French photographer Gyula Halász), Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White.
“It was really a photograph by W. Eugene Smith of the woman in a Haitian clinic that struck me, it haunted me,” He explained. “From that moment on I did nothing for years and years but stick my camera in the face of, mostly, unsuspecting others.
“In those days, I walked around the streets with a Nikkormat FTn with a 24mm lens so you had to get close. I was young and strong and bold and I had no problems walking up to someone and taking a shot. Rarely did I speak to my subjects ahead of time as that would have ruined the moment, that element of surprise, of reality that I was trying to capture.“
Copyright ⓒ Philip Collier
A woman is turning toward Collier. She is standing in a crowd watching a street performer who looks like a juggler. The girl’s glance is friendly, she doesn’t look surprised or alarmed by Flip’s presence.
“This is one of my favorites from ‘The New York Years’ catalogue,” Philip told me. “I was at a street fair on Amsterdam Avenue and about 110th Street… I saw this girl from the other side of the crowd and I came up from behind her and tapped her on the shoulder and took this shot.
“I remember she said : ‘Can you see okay?’ I responded with : ‘No, can you see that I love you’. It was too bad that she was with the guy to her left and I left [with a] broken heart, but I was rewarded with this gem to remember her by, always.”
It is a tender story and one we can all identify with, but in another shot, I have to say my jaw dropped.
Copyright ⓒ Philip Collier
Two young men are standing in close proximity to each other. One man, wearing spectacles, is holding a rifle to the side of the other man’s head. It looks malevolent and real and maybe Flip, as photojournalist for the Boston Globe, has managed to capture this moment of extreme drama to coincide with a story of someone holding another man hostage?
“Ready, Aim….” Taken in Hyannis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts,1973, he says matter-of-fact as he recalls every detail. “I find this very interesting that you chose this particular photo. When people view this they really come up with some crazy ideas (I bet they do) and wonder ‘Did he shoot?’ or ‘Was everything okay?’
“In reality it was just some friends on a trip to Cape Cod who were messing around. Times were very different and we were a little crazy back then.“
A ‘little’ sounds a bit conservative given the photographic evidence? But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the shot captures the young, and slightly ‘crazy’ Flip Collier at work with his equally ‘madcap’ friends and models?
Like Flip I can understand the pull of protest marches. The excitement of getting inside the march and snapping away. Of shooting a crowd coming toward you like a herd of angry elephants and of nearly being knocked over by the sheer weight of numbers. A police officer advising to keep moving as the march reaches you and swallows you up.
“I started to go to a lot of the political rallies for earth day, woman’s rights and later on Ted Kennedy rallies and the DNC (Democratic National Convention) in NYC” Philip revealed. “I noticed I was always more fascinated by the people walking around than the actual candidates or rally speakers.
“I could never shake the desire to study other people. I didn’t understand people.”
Every street photographer, I suspect, shares this curiosity and deep desire to understand and work out what exactly is happening and who the main characters are. To grasp hold of that fleeting and elusive understanding of why we are here, what our purpose is, and what others are about. We also find ourselves trying to discover why people behave in the way they do, who they are and where they are headed.
“This gave me the opportunity to catch them in the act of living,” Flip added. “And take them home and try to figure out who they were and what they were about.”
I caught myself laughing at this. I had the absurd thought of him physically taking real people home as part of a greater experiment to understand existence. He was referring, of course, to their photographs.
Wasn’t he?
Copyright ⓒ Philip Collier
A car, sitting beneath a streetlamp, appears from out of a fog. We are not sure if there is someone in the car looking out, we can’t see. It has a vaguely sci-fi or, even, cyberpunk feel to it. It could be a still from a Philip K Dick movie about a detective who sits in his car on foggy nights waiting for his suspect, and that could be himself, to come by.
This for me is a metaphor for the street photographer, watching, waiting, rapidly absorbing information, while trying to choose exactly the right moment to shoot.
“When I went to a restaurant or a bar,” he informed. “I would always take the seat in the corner looking out so I could watch people come and go. They still hold the same fascination for me today.”
I think street photographers are all on the same train traveling to, what we believe might be, a greater understanding and a greater awareness of our existential journey across history? This is what it is all about you might exclaim, but no one really knows and none of us are ever closer to understanding what this – whatever this is – is all about.
It is the fun and intrigue we find in seeking, that keeps people like Philip Flip Collier practicing the art of street photography for 50 years and more.
“I approach my photography much the same way that I did 50 years ago,” Philip stated. “I am pretty straight forward in that I try to paint a story within the frames and composition is very important to me.”
Copyright ⓒ Philip Collier
The curious glance of strangers we all know so well…
“It was at the Thanksgiving Day Parade (New York City, 1977),” he started up. “What attracted me to this particular shot was… the guy in the hat. Everybody seemed to be looking left or right and this guy just kept watching me approach and he was leaning on one of those police barriers and he seemed to… be waiting for me to take the shot so I did.”
*Philip Collier has used several different cameras in his time as a street photographer. From a little pocket Nikon to an Olympus OM-D to his Fujifilm XT-4 (which he now uses) all with wide angle lenses Find out more about Philip Flip Collier and his wonderful archive of great photographs here and here
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