CAMERA DIARY Midsummer 2024

By Will Simpson.

Among passionate people there is a type who lives perpetually open to the possibility that new passion may arrive at any time and place. Some time ago a passion seized Will Simpson for street photography.

A few years prior, Will made his first EP. Before that he painted. I feel an affinity with Will's artistic method, which as far as I can tell consists of being overtaken bodily by external forces which brook no objections.

Will has described to me and other friends his struggle, between wanting desperately to photograph people on the street and wanting not to come into the human misunderstandings that accompanies the practice; the feeling of being perceived as a creep and the times and places when photographing a storefront could be received as a controversial or aggressive gesture.

But he went on. To begin and be a beginner and then to wrench, slowly and in increments, wonder out of the medium and mastery over tools, and then feel it all becoming your own—that's everything! It's really everything. The world seen for the first time.

—Jo Livingstone

[© Will Simpson 2024]