Madly Seeking Mystery :Reflections On the Street Photography of Penelope McMorris

Madly Seeking Mystery :Reflections On the Street Photography of Penelope McMorris

Think of the photograph as something that flows. It has, like most things, a starting point, a middle and an end – it exists within a frame so it is always ending. We scan the image with our eyes, right to left, top to bottom and develop a narrative which may be right, wrong or, actually, a million light years off centre. Nevertheless we are wired to look for signs, symbols. Our minds want to look for and begin to assemble patterns, or discover little of glimpses of what we know and understand, and, in this way, we construct stories.

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

A man sits with his head in his hands in, what looks like, a bar. We can’t see his face but the man, by his demeanour, looks forlorn. He has just spent his last dollars on a long vodka after a night in the pub, and the reality of now – going home to his wife and explaining why they won’t be able to feed the children or pay the mortgage – has just hit him?

In the background we see the bartender looking remarkably indifferent.

‘Oh, I seen it all before bro,’ we imagine he might say. ‘There is one of them guys in here every night.’

But, if you look really close, the man in the check shirt might actually be simply studying a menu, his head down and focused on what he is going to have to eat? Maybe he is just hungry?

“I feel more confident catching my subjects unaware,” street photographer Penelope McMorris admits “If I ask to take a portrait, I’m too concerned about not taking too long, and I seldom get anything worthwhile.”

It resonates, and it is maybe why street photographers like to be ‘invisible’ and candid.

“I think of myself as a hunter-gatherer when out photographing,” she said, revealing an interesting concept that is so obvious, I like it as a description of what street photographers do – hunting and gathering…

I like that sense of stalking the prey, of hunting down and shooting that photograph, that photograph we later get up onto our laptop screen and think : ‘That’s the one.’

“I normally keep walking, almost afraid of missing something fascinating just around the very next corner,” Penelope continues. “I also study window reflections as I walk, since they can change from minute to minute.”

I also like the exciting idea of images on glass constantly evolving.

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

Two girls are walking over a pedestrian crossing, but are, apparently, being watched by an eye. This photograph has an edginess to it, and, of course, could be many things. It could be a scene from George Orwell’s claustrophic novel on Winston Smith and Big Brother : 1984. Or, it could even be representative of the equally claustrophobic Police song Every Breath You Take …I’ll be watching you…you know the one?

“The eye is the cover of a book in a bookstore window,” Ms McMorris tells me. “The cross-walking girls are reflected in the bookstore window.”

Penelope McMorris grew up in Waukesha, Wisconsin and studied Sociology at Beloit College, before heading 350 miles southeast to Bowling Green State University, Ohio, where she graduated with an MA in Art History.

“So, I went from driving a laundry truck one week,” she said of her working life. “To flying to New York the next as the corporate art curator of Owens Corning, headquartered in Toledo, Ohio.”

With her art background, it was evident McMorris was a thoughtful photographer who enjoyed considering the aesthetics of her work as much as she did the technicals of shutter speed and aperture.

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

“The Charlie Chaplin picture is a rare one that surprised me,” she explained. “My husband and I were on a cruise which stopped in Croatia. It was shopping time (I don’t shop), and I was madly seeking mystery in a lovely town full of tourists. I remember photographing a mirror in a window. But I actually had a ‘wait, what!?’ moment when looking later at my photos, thinking I had gotten nothing. But since Charlie is all lined up I must have seen him – and THAT is exactly what I am always looking for. Sometimes it is even a mystery to me!”

Penelope McMorris’ street photography often borders on abstraction, is laced with a sense of mystery and drama and can be the stuff of nightmares.

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

I thought the woman was Marilyn Monroe, but this, for me was the kind of photograph I could associate with intrigue and bad dreams.

“The image of the woman on the building,” Penelope corrected me. “Is not Marilyn Monroe. I don’t know who the woman is. It was a face I saw projected on the facade of a building in New York City’s SoHo neighbourhood.”

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

A blurred figure, a grey-haired bespectacled man, who could be Arthur Millar – but isn’t? – with his back to us sits at a bus stop.  But look to your right, Marilyn Monroe, no less, is staring at him from the poster. What is he thinking, he doesn’t even seem to be aware of the icon watching him. Yet, it is a poignant portrait of Monroe. Is she looking out from beyond the grave with so much to tell?  Is she willing the unidentified man to look her way, so that their eyes can connect and she can relay her secrets by mind power?

Is it Arthur Miller who outlived his former wife by over 40 years?

“I am always looking for something a bit mysterious, odd, strange or off,” she said. “Something you don’t expect to see but yet the camera sees it that way. That’s exactly why I love reflections.”

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

Images conjured up on glass, of course, speak of life, of the layering of our existential trajectory. The journey down a long highway only half-knowing where we are headed, who we will be, who we will become, and, because of the fragility of life, never really having total certainty. That journey through childhood, adolescence to adulthood. That flow, always continually remembered, and reimagined.

There is no doubt, in my mind, that Penelope is one of those photographers who thinks as much as she acts.

“I first began seriously photographing in about 2006,” she said. “Encouraged by a wonderful Toledo photographer friend, Mark Packo. After so many years of looking at images created by others, I was intrigued by the thought that I could create my own.”

There was a pause,a reflection that hung in space and gathered momentum with time.

“You noted,” Penelope starts up again “I often base my work on existing images. I have a fascination for faces, whether on an already existing image or a stranger. I see real beauty everywhere in a never-ending stream of diverse skin colors, hair shades and styles, tattoos and other adornments passing by. And, I have to balance my natural shyness against my desire to capture some of this. Maybe I’m drawn to already existing images because I know they won’t notice and reject me.”

Copyright ⓒ Penelope McMorris

I don’t think anyone is going to deny the visual power of Penelope McMorris’ work – always compelling, invoking mystery.

She draws our attention to the gap between taking the shot and what emerges, the ever evolving image on the glass of shop windows, the images that surround us that can be used as part of the composition.

We double take her work. What’s that? What is going on there, let’s have another look, I like this, what is this about? In the end, it, quite simply, flows…

To see more of Penelope visits Penelope McMorris

*Penelope McMorris uses a Fujifilm XT30 camera with a 16-80 zoom lens. She has just got a Fujifilm X100V with a fixed 23mm lens (35mm equivalent). And, she adds, she always carries her iPhone with her.