These photos capture the disconnection of mundane city life
Walking around city streets, the glum or neutral expressions of people as they go about their day-to-day business is all too familiar.
It's reflected in the work of Los Angeles-born, now Sydney-based photographer Greg Marsden, who unlike many photographers, only fell into the art form recently after years in the corporate and military worlds.
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"I just wanted to do something more creative with my life," Marsden told Mashable Australia. His various careers involved stints in the U.S. Army, psychology and he was once head of security of a major Australian corporation.
Marsden said that he had "always had a creative frustration," harking back to the days when he and ex-Guns N' Roses drummer Steven Adler started a band in junior high school, as a way to get girls. Long story short, the band wasn't particularly fantastic and they brought in Saul Hudson, later known as Slash, to come play at Marsden's garage in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. Hudson played guitar, but taught Marsden how to play the bass lines of certain songs.
Eventually Hudson and Adler went off and found other band members to form the iconic Guns N' Roses, leaving Marsden ruing the missed opportunity. "If I only practiced, if I only got better, I could've been that bass player," he said.
Admittedly, Marsden said he was never as passionate about the bass guitar, but he had developed an infatuation for the camera. He was determined to not let that passion go, and kept at it.
Now he shoots full time, making the decision to do so in 2012 after working hard at his craft on the side for three years. He also has an Instagram account where he posts his photos, titled "hohum" -- a fitting name for his work that captures the mundane.
Marsden, who studied psychology, said there is a lot of his subconscious coming through his photographs. "There's a lot of light, there's a lot of darkness. The yin and yang ... it's all aspects of me coming out in a photo," he explained.
Marsden's photography captures that split-second we turn our heads and look at people on the street. It's of people going from place to place, head down, deep in thought or with no purpose at all.
"I don't really have a focus on what I do. I just try and take things quickly as they come, and without thinking too much about it. If I think too much about it, I never get a good photo," Marsden said.
Consciously, Marsden looks for certain things around him such as emotions, gestures, a decent background, light, an interesting subject. The prevalence of shadows are a strong part of his photographic style, matched with a clean aesthetic. "I don't like too many things to be stacked on top," he said.
Marsden also explained he only digitally alters the photos to a level you could expect to achieve in a darkroom. "[The photos] have got to be an accurate representation of what I saw when I took the shot and anything you can't do in the darkroom is out of bounds," he said.
Many of his shots are quite intimate and candid, meaning that it can provoke reactions from subjects, even though he uses a compact Leica M9 camera to photograph. Sometimes his subjects are curious, sometimes they're annoyed.
"I have got into a fair number of confrontations with people, and when you get the confidence up and raise the camera to your eye, knowing you're not doing anything wrong, that confidence projects itself," Marsden said. "Rarely now do I get into any confrontations."
Above all, Marsden captures the disconnection of urban life, as cities get fuller and we are more connected than ever. It gives life to the title of his exhibition in May, All The Lonely People, a collaboration with photographers Sam Ferris and Mike Keevers.
"There's a loneliness and an isolation that we seem to capture in the city, even though we're surrounded by heaps of people," Marsden said. "I think that comes through in the majority of the photos."
UPDATE: April 15, 2016, 12:05 p.m. AEST Hudson taught bass lines to Marsden, but didn't play bass. It was originally stated that both played bass in the story.
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