Niall McDiarmid: Street Portraits, Colour and Town to Town
Niall McDiarmid is a Scottish photographer based in London who has spent more than a decade making colour portraits of people he meets on British streets. The work has produced a run of books, beginning with Crossing Paths and continuing through Via Vauxhall and Town To Town.
Niall McDiarmid
The biography on niallmcdiarmid.com describes him as a Scottish photographer living in London whose work documents the people and landscape of Britain. The same page states that his prints are held by the Martin Parr Foundation, the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery and the Sir Elton John Photographic Collection.
His books page lists seven titles: Crossing Paths, Via Vauxhall, Town To Town, Southwestern, Shore, Breakfast and Colour. The biography dates them from 2013 through to 2022.
The street portraits
The method is consistent across the projects. McDiarmid approaches a stranger in a town centre, on a high street or at a bus stop, asks, and photographs them where they stand. There is no studio, no assistant and no set. What carries the pictures is colour: the subject's jacket against a shopfront, a shirt against painted brick, a scarf against a grey pavement. The captions are as plain as the method, usually just a place and a year.
Browsing the work pages on his site gives the geographic spread quickly. Kilmarnock, Rowley Regis, Saltburn-by-the-Sea, Llandudno, Whitley Bay, Anstruther, Folkestone, Limpsfield, Walton-on-the-Naze, alongside London locations from Holloway Road to Clapham Junction. Taken together it is a portrait of Britain assembled one person at a time, in places that the national press photographs mainly when something goes wrong.
Town To Town
Town To Town was published by RRB Photobooks, the Bristol imprint, in January 2018, in a first edition of 1,000 copies. The publisher's listing gives the format as a 120-page hardcover bound in yellow cloth, ISBN 9781999727505.
The book appeared alongside an exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, which ran from 31 January to 12 May 2018. The Foundation's listing describes a seven-year portrait project begun in 2011, made while travelling across the UK, and the exhibition included additional pictures made in Bristol itself.
Street portraiture as a British tradition
Asking a stranger for a portrait and photographing them on the spot is an old practice in Britain, and the people who keep doing it tend to work in long series rather than single images. The holdings that have grown up around it are now institutional: the Museum of London collects photographs of the city's inhabitants, the National Portrait Gallery collects contemporary portraiture, and the Martin Parr Foundation, which opened its Bristol gallery to the public in October 2017, collects and exhibits photography from the British Isles specifically.
That matters for how such projects survive. A series of several thousand street portraits has little commercial life as individual commissions, but it works as a book, as an exhibition and eventually as an archive, which is the route McDiarmid's work has taken. Other photographers working in British portraiture are listed on our speakers index, and the wider archive sits under talks.
Photo Forum is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group. Nothing on this page is drawn from an interview conducted by us. The facts above come from the photographer's site, his publisher and the Martin Parr Foundation, all linked in the text.