Capturing the people of the Diamond Jubilee with inspiration from HCB

Street Assignment

16 Dec

The Queen celebrated her monumental Diamond Jubilee this Summer after 70 years on the throne. I am not a huge royralist but I am a big fan of watching the country come together once every few years to celebrate something positive, so decided to grab my Sony A7 and trusty 55mm Zeiss Sonnar F1.8 ZA lens and head out on the first morning of the festivities to see what I could find.

Like every other street photographer on the planet, I am often inspired to go out and shoot by looking at the work of the godfather of street photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson. While on the train that morning though, it was one of his images that I had in mind most for what I would look for that day.
When sent to London in 1937 to document the coronation of King George VI, Henri decided to turn around and record the people watching this even rather than the procession and parade itself driving past behind him. What that gave us was this striking image of a crowd of working class Londoners of the time lining up to get a glimpse of The Royals and one bloke sleeping through it all.
85 years later, I left the house hoping to capture something similair.

”Trooping of the Colour” was the main event of this Thursday bank holiday. I got up early and followed the crowds to The Mall to find a good spot near the Palace. Many people had been camping overnight to secure their place at the front but I wasn’t concerned about a good view of the parade anyway.

There were already lots of TV reporters and crew when I arrived, interviewing different people there about their thoughts on the day. I think the abundance of TV cameras, press photographers and smart phones put everyone at ease and allowed me to get close to people.

I later looked further into Cartier-Bresson’s photographs from this day as well as his coverage from the 1977 Silver Jubilee and was surprised to find so many similarities of the images that I captured all those years later.