Sean Tucker: "Some street photographers will tell you I’m not a street photographer"

I didn’t work as a photographer for the first 30 years of my life; I enjoyed photography as a child but didn’t do anything with it. In my 20s, I worked for the Church in South Africa, as an ordained pastor, and started doing videos for corporates to subsidize my income, because the Church didn’t pay very well. 

I had just turned 30 when I ended my job with the Church and a friend of mine said that if you have to start a new career at 30, then you might as well pick the thing you want to do and see if you can make it work. 

At that time, photography and video were definitely my main passions. It took me three or four years of trying – and failing – to launch my photography career, working in restaurants as a waiter to pay the bills. 

Then I got my first full-time job with a kitchenware company called Yuppie Chef; it hired me as its food and product photographer, and then as a food photographer for its magazine. 

After a year, I came back to the UK and did product photography for a company called World Stores. I headed up their photography for five years, then did photography and video for an American consultancy. 

About five years ago, I started working for myself, taking portraits, shooting street photography and making videos. So there’s a range of genres in there.

Portrait photography is probably my first love. I think it’s what I’ve got the strongest skillset for and I like that one-on-one intimate working with somebody. 

My university degree was in psychology, and one of my favorite things to do is counseling; I’m currently studying to become a qualified therapist in the UK. I think any portrait photographer will tell you that they become a bit of a therapist on some days, and I love that element of it. 

So I would say that portrait photography is top of the pile for me. Some of my Instagram followers might be surprised by that, because I don’t really post portraits on my feed – it’s mostly street photography.

I’m speaking twice at The Photography Show: the first is a talk I’m giving and the other one is an on-stage discussion with [landscape photographer] Thomas Heaton. My talk is called 'The Meaning and the Making', which is the title of a book I published in 2021. Basically, it’s my philosophy for the creative life, how to stay mentally healthy and motivated and inspired and so on. 

I’m going to be doing a truncated version of the talk that I’ve been giving about the book, which is normally for over an hour. However, I don’t get that long at The Photography Show so I’m going to give a flavor of a little section of the book and hopefully talk about inspiration and how we can find it. 

The other event is a discussion with Thomas Heaton and that will have a moderator present. We’ll be talking about our forays into YouTube and how we built our channels and grew our audiences.

The portrait photography I attempt these days has a classical approach. There was a time when I was throwing three, four or five lights on my subject, using colored gels and trying to get very fancy with things. Over the years I’ve stripped everything back and 90% of the portraits I shoot now are with a 50mm lens and one light, and that’s it. 

At some stage in the middle of my journey, I got quite inspired by the old masters. I used to sit in Room 22 of the National Gallery, where the Rembrandts are. I just realized that there was something about what he did that didn’t feel glossy; it felt quite gritty and earthy and he wasn’t trying to beautify people or hide their age. 

He was trying to make honest portraits and obviously didn’t have multiple lights to work with. He had natural light entering the room which he would control with shutters to narrow it and, because he used it so effectively, Rembrandt lighting is something we still talk about today. So I’m attempting a classical approach with my own portraits, as well as trying to keep them honest and simple in terms of execution. 

And then there's street photography. Some street photographers will tell you I’m not a street photographer because I’m less interested in the reportage of human interactions, which is a traditional approach to street photography, and more interested in light and shadow in urban spaces. The human elements in the frame are often incidental or smaller in the frame and just provide some scale. 

I probably don’t fit that traditional model or definition of street photography, but whatever it’s called, that’s what I do in my street photography. I play with lines and shapes with the shadows, so there’s a graphical element to it. 

Very important. I wouldn’t have been able to go freelance as just a photographer now. I knew who I was and no one cared or should have cared; I was just doing run-of-the-mill work to serve clients and that’s fine.

I always struggle with the marketing side. It really has been because I’ve built an audience by talking about teaching photography or talking about creativity more generally on my YouTube channel that anyone knows who I am now. 

This has afforded me the ability to put some of the client work aside and just make the work I believe in and fund myself by building my own thing, which I’m grateful for every day.

There’s a certain amount of luck and good timing in it, too. It’s a lot harder to do now than it used to be. When I started [in 2016] it was probably easier, but I have been plugging away slowly and building it up over the years. 

For now, it works and that’s probably going to change sometime, but I’ve been very lucky so far.

I’m very happy to teach photography online but I think people who watch my channel know I use photography as a bit of a Trojan horse to talk about things that I think are more important, like our wellbeing and what creative output is actually for, the good it does us and how we have to keep all that in context so that we don’t take it overly seriously and lose that motivation. 

All that stuff is what I really care about because I’ve seen that it makes such a difference to people’s lives. I get emails from people thanking me for one thing I said in a video that really hit them at just the right time and made all the difference. Those are the emails I care about more than, "Thanks for teaching me which aperture I should be shooting at." 

So much like it’s a different level of meaning for me, and while I say I’m very happy to teach photography, I’m always looking for that other level in what I do because it makes such a long-term difference for people. 

For studio work I have a Sony A7R IV with a 50mm f/1.2 – just that one-body, one-lens combo. 

For street photography, my most used camera has been the Ricoh GR IIIx, which is a compact camera with a fixed 40mm lens. I just like the portability of it and being able to transfer images to the phone via Wi-Fi. It's a very lightweight travel setup. 

For middle-of-the-road stuff, I've got a Sony A7C and a Sony A7 III with a Sony 35mm f/1.8, an 85mm f/1.8 and a Zeiss 55mm f/1.8. 

That does me for any any kind of situation for street photography, portrait photography or filmmaking when I'm on the road. I can do pretty much anything with those. 

It’s more on the filmmaking side – I’ve always had a dream of one day, producing a feature-length documentary on certain subjects. That’s a lofty goal I have that may or may not happen, but it’s good to have a vision to aim for.