“Poland Street Photography” is my first ever photographic exhibition — an exhibition of Street Photography from my travels to Kraków, Zakopane, Warsaw, and Gdańsk.
My First Camera
I got my first camera in 1986 when I was 16. It was an ancient Voigtländer Vito C which my dad found in a builder’s skip. I popped in a roll of 35mm film and started shooting my friends and family without a clue about shutter speeds and apertures. By pure luck, that first roll of film developed perfectly. Had it not, I might never have got the bug for photographing people. Over the following years I moved from film to digital, and in 2007 turned professional. These days I shoot weddings, environmental portraits, and corporate events for a living, but my greatest love is for the genre of Street Photography.
Discovering Poland and Street Photography
I first discovered Street Photography when I travelled to Poland in 2011. At the age of 41, it was the first time I had travelled anywhere outside of the United Kingdom, apart from a school day trip to France when I was 11! This time I travelled with my dad — a “father-and-son” trip. Dad had been to Poland several times before and he wanted to take me to see Kraków and Zakopane. Kraków was indeed a lovely city, and the mountainous scenery of Zakopane was simply stunning, just as dad had described it. There was an abundance of beautiful sights to photograph including some superb architecture, but it was the people that I was drawn to photograph. So many interesting people, going about their everyday lives, their work, their shopping.
Since then, my passion for Street Photography has grown. So too has my love for Poland and the Polish people who I have found to be warm, friendly, and fascinating to photograph. In 2012 I took another trip to Poland, this time to Warsaw, with the express purpose of shooting Street Photography. The following year I returned to photograph the people of Gdańsk. The photographs in Poland Street Photography are just a few of those I have taken of the people on the streets of Poland.
Isolation and Boxes
A good friend who accompanied me on a recent Street Photography trip picked up on something I’d not noticed before. He commented on how so many of my photographs are based around an isolated individual, often boxed-in in some way. If you check out my portfolio of Street Photography you’ll see he’s quite right. Very few of my images involve more than one person as the subject, and most of them are contained within a box or boundary of some kind — a doorway, a window frame, two parallel walls.
Pondering on his observation, I think I favour single subjects over multiple ones because they are simpler, less cluttered. Also, I am naturally an introvert (personality type INFJ) and I use up a lot of energy when interacting with people. I prefer to observe, to “people watch”. Perhaps my street photography is a reflection of my inner self, the isolated individual confined within my introversion.
Photos © Daniel Torridon
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