If you follow my blog you will probably know that every so often I post a selection of the montage street style portraits that I shoot for Brighton Source Magazine. After seeing my montage portraits of the Phoot Camp attendees Source Magazine asked me to shoot their trend spotting section for the January 2010 issue as a guest spot. Four years later I was still trend spotting for them. Unfortunately after all that time Source has now ceased as a Magazine due to shrinking advertising revenues – you can read more about it on Source’s site here. It’s a massive loss for Brighton as Source was a champion of local talent. Their main editorial rule was that whatever or whoever is featured it had to be local to Brighton. Initially Source was going to carry on as an online entity but it looks like that will not happen as even without a full time staff they can’t make the website work with the available advertising revenue. I hope that James Kendall (editor) and all the other Source staff luck with their future endeavours.
I really enjoyed shooting for Source. It forced me to get at least five strangers portraits every month which now means I now have coming up to 500 montage portraits. I am going to continue shooting them but I will save them for extra special people and continue posting on my Fragmented Portraits Tumblr and Flickr. The downside of having to shoot them every month is that I had to shoot a film’s worth every month. I shot seven pictures for each person which means I get five people to a film, if I hadn’t shot a film’s worth and I was nearing the magazine deadline I would quite often have to lower my style standards to finish the film.
As it happens I have not shot a montage portrait since November as winter is tough for street fashion has everyone is usually wearing long dark coats. Now that weather is improving I will get back into it and start shooting, but I must admit it is nice to take a little break after four years. Below is a selection of the portraits I shot for Source from September to November 2013. This won’t be the last time I post some of the montages.