Brett Walker featured in Spotlight 7

This week in Spotlight 7 we feature the work of Brett Walker as chosen by guest curator and Week 17 artist Bukutgirl, aka Liz Kasameyer. This week represented a first for Spotlight 7, as it featured a phone interview instead of the traditional email interview. Bukutgirl found the interview to be an adventure unto itself, with midnight phone calls across the Atlantic and more like it.

Brett has lived all over the world, and traveled across the seas for many years in the Greek Merchant Marine. Angola, Belgium, Brazil, France, Italy and of course London itself. I can't do justice to either the interview or the images with a few short words. Here's an excerpt from Bukutgirl's interview of/ story about Brett Walker.

3) What is your process when you got out to shoot? Do you go out with a purpose or do you just shoot and let the shots call out to you when you’re editing?
Brett has a formal job, but it allows him a lot of time out in the streets to shoot, he says he shoots on average 400 frames a day, and counts himself lucky if he likes one. He shoots with a wide angle lens and likes to basically shoot street candids, catching the honest moments of a person’s day when they are simply existing. He doesn’t go out with a goal for a certain scene, just goes out to see what the streets will bring him. He said that sometimes he’ll see someone and they fit a memory or an idea, and he’ll try to shoot them to that end, like seeing a man in a market who fits his vision of what his father might have looked like. He shoots often from the hip, afraid to look down to see if he’s “killed it or simply wounded it” – referring to the shot that is, and when a great shot shows up everything else is out of the window for the day, nothing else will do but to go home and edit. In describing the editing process, and image selection he said that he’ll start playing with something in photoshop, not even sure what will come out of it and the image guides his work from there, often dumping him at the end with a shocked feeling that he hadn’t even really realized that that was what needed to come out or that that moment was inside.

Please check out the rest of the exhibition and leave a comment or ask a question. Thank you very much.