Street Fashion Photography (a brief)

One of my projects from my photography course was titled 'Street Fashion Photography' and the brief was to take photos to illustrate an article on how street style influences fashion trends, and vice versa. As part of my research I spent a day in East London photographing people wearing outfits I was drawn to for one reason or another. I was surprised by how difficult this task proved to be - lots of the people I approached declined to have their photo taken, even though I explained it wasn't going to be published. But it was an interesting experience, and I definitely could not do this for a living! Below are a selection of my images...

 I took a few of these images and used them as the basis for a 'mood board' style collage, much in the same way that designers or fashion houses create mood boards for inspiration and to highlight key trends.

For my final piece I wanted to combine the rough and ready style of the shots I'd taken around Brick Lane, but whilst referencing the fashion industry. So I went out, this time on Carnaby Street, and took Fujifilm Instax photos (with the 'wide' version rather than the 'mini' one so I could get more detail in) of people wearing interesting outfits. I also asked them a few questions about themselves, their outfits, and about their notions of 'style.' I thought that, since people were not keen on stopping when all I wanted was a photo, it would be nearly impossible to get people to fill in a short questionnaire, but everyone did!

One of the questions I asked was 'what inspires your style?' - I used the participants' answers to this question to annotate each photo (using my trusty dymo labeller!) and then made a collage of the images which I scanned in. Below is the final image which I submitted.

Oh and finally, just because it made me smile, here is a cute piece of graffitti from Brick Lane that I snapped in between photographing the local fashionistas...