The working life of Museum of London

This weeks post is from Hazel, the second of our The Big Issue vendors, who have voluntered to take pictures representing their view of London streets according to their understanding of the ’street photography’ criteria of un-posed, spontaneous moments.

Here Hazel explains her initial thoughts on the project: “when I was told about this project and then given this camera, I thought, no, I have too much clutter in my mind to define what I see and what I want to say. But then what the heck I opened the shutter and these are some of the pictures I took”.

Hazel also provided the captions that accompany these two images.

“Street People”

Hazel has recently given a talk to a group of teenagers and volunteers, they asked her about ‘begging’ and Helen told them: “I don’t use that word because the name you give someone affects how you see them. The ones you call Beggars I call Cup People and the homeless, I call Street People“.

“This is Vauxhall/Oval where a lot of the people have been re-housed. A lot of the people are very poor. You can’t take pictures of children but this is where the children play”

Although not strictly meeting the exact ’street photography’ criteria, the strength of Hazel’s caption for the above image ensured its inclusion in this post and highlights the personal nature of this project.

Hazel admits to initially having problems fitting in taking photographs and selling copies of the magazine as this diary extract from the first two days of February highlights: “…still having trouble working the camera. I’ll sell a few issues and get back to it…next day, I’m clicking away. I hope the camera has accepted them cos I can’t find them”.

 Images from this project will feature in our our upcoming London Street Photography exhibition at the Museum of London.

Catch up on Mahesh’s first blog for this project here.