Photographer Jed Fielding calls his encounters with the people he shoots “short collaborations.” Considering the way he works, the intimate pictures he comes up with, and the fact that his subjects are strangers he approaches in the street, they could hardly be anything else. Fielding’s wide-angle lens, usually positioned less than a foot from his subjects, focuses on a face, a torso, the top of a head, or some other fragment. The pictures are skewed and striking.
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Fielding has been taking his strange street portraits for 15 years, mostly in foreign countries like Mexico, Greece, Egypt, Morocco, or Italy–one of his favorites. “I always seem to go back to Italy,” says Fielding, who’s been there four times, for a total of about 15 months. “It was easier for me to make pictures there than anywhere else,” he says. “The people were so willing to be photographed.”
He developed his close-up, wide-angle method on those first two trips. “Maybe it was because I was in a new country for the first time,” he says. “I had this need to interact with the people I was photographing. Not because I want to get to know the people–I like that, but it has nothing to do with the way the pictures look. The fact that I’m so physically close makes my pictures look the way they do. I really don’t want to make the kind of picture that is taken from far away.”
Fielding has stories both good and bad about his experiences with people he’s photographed, but he doesn’t like to tell them. “To talk about those people doesn’t seem fair,” he says. “I like the photographs to speak for themselves.”
