Exploring Mixed Media in Street Photography
I’ve always been interested in the space where street photography meets mixed media. A photograph may begin as a record of a real moment, but I’m just as interested in what happens when I start working on it afterwards. That’s where the conversation begins—between what the camera saw and what I experienced.
This image is built from three photographs, with two of them showing the same man wearing headphones and carrying a drink. They were taken just a few seconds apart, but combining them into a single frame creates a subtle doubling, as though time has folded in on itself. Instead of one decisive moment, there are several, existing together.
The camera gives me the raw material: the perspective, the light, the textures and the everyday reality of a Liverpool street. The painterly and graphic marks are my response to that reality. They aren’t there to disguise the photograph but to reveal another layer of seeing—one that’s shaped by memory, curiosity and imagination as much as observation.
What first caught my attention wasn’t just the man himself, but the headphones. They’re everywhere now. So many people seem to move through the city wrapped inside their own private world, disconnected from the sounds, conversations and little surprises that make a place feel alive. I sometimes wonder what they’re missing.
That thought made me smile because I wasn’t always any different. Back in the 1980s I used to wander through Whitechapel Market listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on my Sony Walkman, complete with those wonderfully bright orange sponge headphones. At the time it felt magical to carry your own soundtrack wherever you went. These days it’s the opposite. If I’m out with my camera, I don’t want anything between me and the street. I want to hear the buses, the footsteps, the snippets of conversation and the unexpected moments that so often become photographs.
In this picture the man is physically present, but mentally somewhere else, absorbed in whatever he’s listening to. Between the two versions of him, a blurred passer-by cuts across the frame, reminding us that the city never pauses for anyone. Life keeps flowing around us whether we’re paying attention or not.
I’ve left most of the image in monochrome, allowing the turquoise headphones and the cool blue tones of the passer-by to remain. Those small pockets of colour became important to me. They pull the eye around the composition and add a quiet rhythm that I hope echoes the movement and energy of the street itself.
For me, this piece isn’t really about headphones at all. It’s about the different ways we experience the same place. Photography gives us the confidence that this moment really happened. The mixed-media process reminds us that every photograph is also personal—that what we notice, remember and choose to emphasise is always filtered through our own way of seeing.
Perhaps that’s why I still enjoy working this way. The photograph records the world in front of me, while the layers I add afterwards say something about the world I carry with me.
