Eyeshot 50mm #66 | Max Sturgeon: How Flash Changed His Street Photography

In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Max Sturgeon joins the series. American photographer, winner of the Eyeshot Open Call in the series category, and the author of Of a Different Stripe (Eyeshot, 2021), he arrived at photography from somewhere else entirely.

He started travelling before he started photographing. Cinema and travel were the two passions that came first, and photography grew out of both. He has worked on film sets for more than twenty years, and when the filmmaking stopped feeling like a passion and started feeling like a job, the need to make something moved across into the street. There was no art school in between. He taught himself, then took workshops, and he is straightforward about that being the whole education.

What the cinema left behind is the preference for a body of work over a single frame. He shoots in projects, he says he has about ten of them running at any one time, and he wants images that tell a story in sequence rather than one picture that stands alone.

The position he takes on the street is the opposite of invisible. He does not shoot at home in the United States, because nothing there surprises him any more, and he defends the outsider without dismissing the argument for the local photographer: he simply thinks someone arriving from elsewhere sees what a resident has stopped seeing. As a foreigner he could not hide even if he wanted to, so he stopped trying. And then there is the rule he breaks on purpose. One of the most repeated instructions in street photography is that nobody should be looking at the camera. He frames through the viewfinder, lowers the camera, waits for the person to make eye contact, and releases the shutter at that moment.

That preference has a reason behind it, and it is the sharpest passage of the conversation. He says street photography can feel soulless: people stack figures and layers, they do it well, and there is nothing underneath. He is careful to call it a personal preference rather than a verdict, but he does not soften what he means. A photograph that uses technique with nothing filling it does not speak to him.

The flash arrived the same way, by reversal. He was against it, thought it aggressive, said he would never do it. Then he travelled with photographers who worked that way, saw that people were not reacting badly, and tried it. What it gave him was not a look but a removal: the flash takes away the barrier, because once the subject knows they are being photographed there is nothing left to dance around. He is equally clear about where the technique goes wrong, and calls the walk-up-and-fire habit the biggest trap in flash photography.

On the state of the genre he is unsentimental. Rules and guidelines limit what you can do, and they encourage exactly the repetition everyone complains about. On social media he says something few photographers say out loud: he shoots pictures he knows will perform, they are not his favourites, and he does it anyway, because publishers and clients look at follower counts and an audience is what lets the other work be seen.

The Open Call comes late in the conversation and turns out to be the part with the most practical value. When he submitted, he already had the book edited, because he had been planning to self-publish. Asked for thirty more images, then a hundred, he had them. The editing itself he learned in Delhi, at a workshop with Vineet Vohra, who looked at the group and changed the subject: you all know how to shoot, let us work on sequencing instead. It was, he says, the thing he fell in love with immediately, and it is the reason he insists that a book is not only made of its strongest images. You need the transitions, the ones that get you there. His advice to anyone entering a call is to send a series, and his reason is arithmetic: single images arrive in the thousands, series do not.

He ends somewhere quieter. Asked what street photography is actually for, he says he does not know, and then answers anyway. He thinks of the photographers he meets while travelling, some retired, some going through something difficult, for whom this is the thing that gives them energy and a reason to go out into the street. Maybe that is what it is for.