Love to show you some of the pictures of Barbara Iweins project ‘Au coin de ma rue’ today. Barbara is an Amsterdam based photographer and her project is based on her obsession with strangers and her drive to find out more about each individual passer-by. She decided to embrace this obsession and capture some of these people 7 years ago. She bought a camera and a 50mm fixed lens and simply started to ask and immediately realised that it would not be as easy she thought.
Barbara: ‘What I had not realized- lacking any real photography experience- is that a 50 mm lens didn’t allow me to shoot a full body and keep the details of a face. Instead I took two pictures, one of the face and one of the legs and thought I would photoshop them together. I quickly realized this was a pretty bad idea. But when I placed the head and the body side by side I loved the result. And so AU COIN DE MA RUE was born ! Each day I walked around Amsterdam for two hours to make pictures of people” The stranger eventually became a friend and Barbara followed 30 of them for 5 years, and each year she made a picture of them with a different theme.
If you look at year 1, you might recognize some people from the “Street Style memory Game” The name was given to the game by her publisher and sold over 10.000 copies to date and is still loved by the international fashion and style press…. If you ask Barbara though… she says “In real I didn’t want to detail the dressed person I wanted to “undress” them and as a voyeur, enter his life and thoughts as much as possible” I was touched by the beautiful black and white pictures of year 3 visit Barbara’s site for more inspiring pictures.