Erik van Straten at Flashbak from 2015.

My experience is that every set of Erik's pictures is a master class in composition coupled with meaning. This one is no exception.
 
An very nice set indeed , thanks for for sharing here !
Congrats to you Erik !
Have you gone back to London since ?
Cheers
JM.
 
He certainly squeezed a few visits into his week - I can definitely spot Kew Gardens in there, and the Cast Courts at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Lovely stuff.
 
Wow!! Amazing eye at 19! Beautiful images. Wonderful work Erik!!
 
Let's try to get out of all the "superb", "fantastic", "thanks for sharing" ground level comments. There might be a bit more to say about that stunning piece of work coming from a very young man taking photos in the mid-1970s.

I know that one of Erik's main inspiration source is HCB's work, but, paradoxicallly enough, those make me rather think of Robert Frank's. Let's not forget the incredible Tony Ray-Jones, the comet of the British black and white social photography (1941-1972) but I don't know whether Erik knew him or not at that time. There are clearly some connections here. That would be interesting if Erik could tell us a bit more about how he saw the world around him back then, and what he was looking for when he was wandering all over Europe with his camera, and what was his educational and personal photographic mental background.

The photo of the two girls rolling themselves on the park grass is by far my absolute favorite of this series, for many reasons I would be happy to discuss with Erik in front of a cup of capuccino once and again at 't Smalle.
 
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Excellent, perceptive photographs, Erik. I don't know how many photos you took during your trip, but even if it was 3000+ you have an impressive % of keepers.

My photos from age 19 are best forgotten.
 
Andy Kibber said:
My photos from age 19 are best forgotten.
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Interesting food for thought. This is not to generalize it all, because there are some exceptions to everything, but it quite happens often that, if you are too far away from taking good photos when you're young (at the age of the great sentimental strikes you receive from what's around you and from what has been made by other artists so far), things don't improve as you grow up.

By good, I mean : meaningful and mastered, with them delivering a message, telling a story, using clear composition rules - either to comply to them or to act up yourself against them, with everything related to the basics of the photo technique mastered for long, and not interfering with how you look at things you take photos of any longer.

This can also apply to movie directors, music componists, or painters... and, to some extent, to writers and actors. IMO, of course. ;)
 
In 1971 - at the age of 16 - I was one of the youngest ever admitted students at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. This was an "Arts et Métier" like school where training was done more in the direction of graphic design, photography, goldsmithing, ceramics and the like than in the direction of the official visual arts painting and sculpture. After the base year, I was admitted to the photography department in 1972. There, people were quickly trained to become professional photographers. Much emphasis was placed on darkroom work. In 1973 I made a nice series of photos in Spain and in the spring of 1974 in London. In the meantime, however, I was also fascinated by drawing, free painting and art history, so that photography soon faded into the background for me. But the blood creeps where it cannot go. I had known Cartier-Bresson's work since 1972, but I didn't discover Robert Frank until much later.

Erik.

gelatine silver print (nikkor 50mm f2) nikkormat ftn (1973)

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