Darkrooms Uncovered - Olli Thomson
A peek into a photographer's mental creative darkroom
What does your creative ritual look like? Do you have specific habits or conditions that spark your creativity?
Most of my photography could be described as street photography - though I prefer to call it urban photography - and my creative ritual, such as it is, is to walk the streets photographing whatever catches my eye. My goal is to build a record of the urban environment I find myself in a create a cumulative and ever evolving impression. It's a very unstructured approach mostly, but I do occasionally build in a slightly more ordered approach by using the metro system (assuming there is one!) Either I go to the end of the line and follow the route back, or I pick a station on the system and focus on the immediate neighbourhood. I try to mix return trips to favoured locations with trips to new neighbourhoods.
When you're feeling creatively blocked, what's your go-to method for breaking through?
I just keep plodding on, taking pictures even if it feels like a struggle, even if I feel sure there's nothing worth keeping, even when having looked through the results I confirm there's nothing worth keeping. Or I look at photobooks - not for inspiration, just for pleasure. Or I'll go back through my catalogue of images tidying up as I go or reprocessing older images differently. Or I'll pull together some existing images and create a new photo zine or book. Mostly, though, I've stopped worrying about this. Sooner or later the desire to get out and photograph the world returns. Sometimes it's better to relax and be patient that worry and try to force things.
Describe a moment when your creative perspective shifted dramatically. What triggered it?
I don't think there has ever been a single moment, but rather a gradual evolution of my perspective on photography. At the core of that evolution is my conviction that photography is, to use a religious metaphor, Protestant rather than Catholic. That is to say the nature of photography, the 'rightness' or 'truthfulness' of any aspect of photography, is not determined by an authoritative hierarchy of persons, institutions or traditions. It is, instead, a decentralized tradition of competing - and often squabbling - groups and traditions where we can all determine what photography is for us according to our own conscience.
What recurring themes or elements do you find yourself naturally drawn to capture?
Urban life and urban space - in a documentary way. Impressions. The streets of whatever city I happen to find myself in. Everyday people getting on with everyday life. Markets, cyclists, umbrellas. Ordinariness. I've always been much taken by Stephen Shore's comment: "to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in."
What non-photographic influences (books, music, films, etc.) most impact your work?
I don't think either films or music have any influence, and the only books that influence me are photobooks, so not really non-photographic.
What photograph of yours feels most personally revealing, and why?
This is Bella. We found her living on the streets of Tirana in Albania when we moved there in 2005. Everyone told us to avoid the street dogs - they were dangerous, diseased - so we approached with caution. She approached us with her own kind of caution. We never planned to have a dog but two years later when we left Albania she came with us. Then she came with us to the United States, to Germany and to Georgia where we buried her. In twenty years as an expat, taking Bella off the streets and giving her a good home and a good life is the most satisfying thing I've done. I have a print of this picture that has hung in every place we've lived since she passed away. I have taken and printed plenty of photographs over the years that I'm pleased with, even proud of, but if the house was burning down this is the print I would save.
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Website: https://ollithomson.myportfolio.com/
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