Blurring the Line Between Art and Photography

This photograph isn’t about a particular street, or even a particular moment, it’s about the feeling of a busy town centre: the sights and sounds, the motion that never quite settles.

It’s an impression, not a document.

The aim wasn’t to capture a scene clearly, but to translate the experience of being in it - that restless energy of crowds, shops, choices, and noise - into something visual.

“Consumer Confidence” was created using Intentional Camera Movement (ICM), a technique I often return to when I want to move beyond straightforward depiction. With a slow shutter and a deliberate sweep of the camera, the scene becomes fluid, people blend into architecture, time softens, and the photograph becomes more like a memory or a mood than a report.

This work sits in deliberate contrast to my usual street and live music photography, which is more observational and precise - portraits of a moment, frozen and clear. With ICM, I’m letting go of that clarity, embracing ambiguity. It allows me to explore photography as a more expressive, interpretive medium - less about showing what something looked like, and more about how it felt to be there.

The title “Consumer Confidence” is a playful nod to the economic phrase, but also a gentle critique of everyday life. There’s movement, yes, but what kind? Purposeful? Automatic? Joyful? Anxious? The blur invites those questions, rather than answering them.

What excites me about this kind of image is the way it straddles boundaries - between photography and painting, between street and abstraction. It resists categorisation, and that’s the point. Not every image has to be sharp to cut through.

Let me know what it evokes for you.