It’s not so hard to identify the elements common to Matt Stuart’s most memorable photographs: from the pops of colour, to the double-take humour, to the echoing repetition of shapes and lines. The process by which they are achieved is less easy. Stuart has patiently photographed London’s streets for 22 years now, capturing the relentless pace and drama of the contemporary city, and those moments of accidental beauty that coalesce for a heartbeat, then just as swiftly melt away.
In the era of smartphone cameras, many Londoners indulge in a casual form of street photography, feeding filtered and adjusted pictures into image-sharing platforms like Instagram. Stuart’s impeccably poised photographs are the fruit of honed instincts and a sharp eye, rather than digital wizardry and editing software. For his street work, he shoots on film using a Leica MP, a discreet manual camera he carries with him everywhere. A day of walking and shooting might consume three rolls of film; precious few exposures compared to the limitless splurge offered by digital cameras. Rather than hedging his bets with a spray of shots, Stuart must trust his reflexes, skill and equipment.
The humour in Stuart’s photos – be it Eros firing his arrow at an enraptured woman cooing into her phone, or a Great Dane dog apparently seated behind the wheel of a car – is gentle, rarely at the subjects’ expense. Stuart credits an innate sense that he is doing no wrong with furnishing him with a kind of psychic invisibility,providing him with a form of camouflage when he shoots in public. He has no reason to be furtive or apologetic: everything he does is in service of a beautiful shot, the right light, the right colours, the right combination of people (and animals) moving across a frame.
A selection of Stuart’s photographs, taken between 2002 and 2015, were gathered in the volume <em>All That Life Can Afford</em> (2016). Like the photographers who captured New York’s mid-century streets – Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Lee Friedlander – Stuart has captured the mood of his home city in a particular era.
