Outside of his successful career shooting advertising and commercial work, Dan Medhurst fuels his love and passion for photography through constant personal projects. This body of work is part of a series of images called ‘Point and Click’.Working as a full time freelance photographer for the past three years, he’s shot all sorts of commissioned ads, portraits and features. Most of these are shot digitally with strict brief constraining how the images need to look, mood, lighting and interaction with the model.
“Obviously this is the nature of shooting commissioned work, I approach these jobs more like a graphic designer as opposed to an artist… Meaning I can’t be precious about my work. If a client is not happy with the set up, I am flexible and I change things up and try again until they get exactly what they are looking for in the same way a graphic designer would. This is all fine but often it will end up being more their image than mine.”
To me point and click feels like an internalised reaction against these professional interactions and the rules that go with them. The images in “point and click”are loose and gleeful.
“Its my project and I can take an artist approach instead. I bought and old 1982 Russian 35mm Zenit camera at the start of the year and have really enjoyed having the freedom to make pictures without a huge lighting set up or any overly contrived situation.”
This is far from the set-up he uses professionally. Whilst the Mamiya RZ67 120 camera he uses at work can create huge supersharp images it’s not something you can really carry around.
“Point and Click has given me the freedom to create a ‘from the hip’ series of shots of every day life and the people I encounter along the way. It’s not about having a pin sharp image that is beautifully lit or has a concept style to it, or about perfect exposure and colour, it’s just about the people who are in it. It’s almost like a visual diary of my friends and family. I have a poor memory at best so now I’ll be able to see what I was doing in 2010 when I’m an old dodger!
I titled it ‘Point and Click’ as some of my close friends found it amusing to trivialise what I do for a living and would say things like “Anyone can be a photographer. Its well easy, all you do is point and click”. In a way they were right… with this series at least!
I don’t think I’ll ever stop shooting high quality concept images but I really enjoy using my ‘little clicky’ and the freedom it gives me to get a different style of photograph.”
To view the whole series head over to Dan’s website.
Dan Medhurst