There’s an old handball court at Venice Beach that David Ingraham – a musician as well as photographer – describes as a “quintessentially southern California location”. It is, the Young Dubliners drummer says, “always busy and wonderfully diverse, packed with people from all over the world, making it a prime street-photography spot”.
He doesn’t see this particular shot, which he captured back in 2015 on an iPhone 8, as a product of good luck, however. “I had an idea in my mind’s eye of what I wanted, so I positioned myself accordingly and then observed, waited, shot, repeated,” Ingraham says. “Taking a quick shot and then moving on rarely results in anything worthwhile. I couldn’t have got something like this without doing my homework first, studying the work of the masters of the craft, such as Alex Webb and Henri Cartier-Bresson.”
It was the latter who coined the term “the decisive moment”, which is what drew Ingraham towards this location in the first place. He says: “These courts, with their strong geometric lines and graphic numbers, seemed bursting with potential for a decisive moment.”
He shot using the iPhone’s Noir filter, saying he feels he works better with tones than with colour. As for how he hopes the image makes others feel or think, he says: “It conveys a bit of the simple, serendipitous beauty of day-to-day life, which is constantly unfolding all around us if we just choose to stop and take notice.”
