As someone who loves active and involved style street photography, Covid-19 has been a challenge for getting photos of interesting people or neat moments since there are fewer people on my college campus and are practicing social distancing. While unsure of how to adapt my style of street shooting for Covid, I came across the work of two London street photographers Joshua K. Jackson and Craig Whitehead. A significant aspect of their work is abstractness through various means, one of which they both use are reflections and glass.
Their work moved my focus onto the purely visual parts of street photography. Using reflections with mirrors or glass out and about tends to fog or haze details in an image, but this shifted my eyes to pay more attention to shape, color, and texture. I began to see people more as visual elements in a composition rather than a potential model for a scene or story.
Although this approach lessens the story telling aspect of street photography that I love, amongst a widespread pandemic, this has been a great compromise and led to some work that I really enjoy. Now when out and about, even without a camera, I find myself constantly looking at the potential images in reflections on windows and glass rather than through it.
