"Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!" Life of Brian
I never have a plan when I head out with the camera to photograph people on the streets of London, but this past few months I’ve been walking by Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Park.
For those of you who don't know about this part of the park, it's an area that's been set aside since the 1800's for people to talk about anything they like (Think of the scene in Life of Brian, just before he ends up with loads of followers). I've always found this to be interesting and for the first time in years, I decided to hang around and take a few photos. I was glad I did, first off I'm not really sure why I haven't been to speakers corner with my camera before, I guess for me I've always thought that taking street photos of speakers, performers etc was just to easy however with speakers corner I couldn't have been more wrong.
It wasn't easy as there is so much going on that you have no idea where to start, so I took 5 minutes to watch, trying to take everything in. I find that taking your time helps me to relax and then everything just clicks into place. On this day there were 4 speakers, one gentleman (above) talking about benefits, then there were 2 ladies talking about Islam and the Quran. Again like the gentleman talking benefits I couldn't get that close. Then there were 3 people trying to prove that the bible was wrong And the last group was preaching that we were all going to hell.
I will be revisiting Speakers corner over the coming year, I think it could make for an interesting project.
