Nothing Out of the Ordinary. I have been taking pictures on the street for 25 years and only stumbled upon the term 'street photography' after a period messing around with aviation projects some years ago. It never occurred to me that by simply reporting the ordinary in the documentary tradition, it had another new title within Photography. It felt as if I’d missed the flight. My pictures aren’t trying to sell any product nor endorse brand London. Instead, they’re largely absurd, dystopian, quirky reactions that confront the interests of pseudo-public landowners. The privatisation of public space (glass castles patrolled by hi-vis pikemen) are mapped with rows of pavement studs marking corporate no-mans lands. Their default position is to say you’re on private land and to push off but they’re largely protecting their own job rather than the property, so are clueless when taken off-script. Exploring a city can make one insecure, to say the least. And discovering one’s own relationship with its noisy, pacey, anonymity brings on paranoia and delusion that lurks within the optimism of taking good pictures in an urban locale. Every journey is a chance; a high-risk business that often yields little. None of the certainties liked by bankers. Rebecca Solnit likens the walking speed of city flâneurs (wanderers) to ‘the mind at 3 miles an hour’ and I like labouring on routes which manipulate random encounters: So when a journey itself helps contrive the coincidence between people, a background, a shadow and me. I don’t fret about missing something I haven’t seen but getting to that place in the universe by some sort of astrological collision of time and space, is a daily ambition. Each spontaneous choice governs what karmic snapshots are made. Do I turn left, or right – or cross the river to go home? The people I encounter may be locals or tourists, runaways or pickpockets. Pepys, Dickens and Virginia Wolf all sauntered obsessively through their own eras of London and Kierkegaard said that during his tours of Copenhagen he was, ‘studying his human subjects - urban botanising’. I still see my younger self on many street corners - a young man still to be a father, and still to make many images that will define him. This slow, meditative form of reportage is an antidote to high-speed browsing but it can still be exhausting. And when that mental and visual fog eventually sets in, get the coffee in and take a window seat. Cartilage cells have been left behind, over many years on these pavements. On almost every day of one's life, a picture exists. A large set of 400 can be seen at: http://bit.ly/fxVIZi

In this gallery of thematic coincidences and repetitions one follows carefully edited sequences of street incidents that use colour, circumstance and form as threads. They originate from the early 90s to the present and include the workman; dogs; faces; mannequins; backdrops; seasides; spillages. Returning from aviation projects (Red Arrows, 2005) I have been drawn again into public places, spurred on after reports of farcical incidents when tourists were suspected of terrorist surveillance. It's hugely exciting (and overwhelming) to venture from home and take street pictures. But while it is an exercise of unconstrained, spontaneous possibilities there can be no better examples of wasted days when walking pavements yields nothing but sore feet. People and landscapes are fickle and it's also easy to become paranoid at what one might miss simply by looking say, a few degrees to the left, mere feet from where the most magical moment has occurred. While I prefer to seek the overly complex and complicated I tend to find the minimal and simple; the poignant and quietly incongruous. This isn't so much an annoyance as a surprise to me that I come home with twos and threes of people and objects rather than multiples. Outs become stock, laden with suggestive conceptual keywords: Worry; nerves; suspicion; tension; romance and oddity. I would urge the viewer to see this gallery as a slideshow in full-screen mode and to watch until the end, where many of my favourite pictures have been deliberately placed. And if you care to help me edit this work, I will willingly send you an invite to rate the images within a lightbox. A small edit of the Top 30 is here: http://bit.ly/13sLIMX

One psalm in my Street Photography mission, is the everyday purpose of transporting objects of retail, for construction and because of waste. It is an opportunist theme that I inadvertently keep responding to, accidentally seeing even more diverse items and possessions that need moving around. The A-B of items on the move is constant. Historically, these things are being carried by workers and couriers, shoppers, commuters, and businessmen - the professions of centuries. The one aspect I can influence is their sequencing, an ordering of their shapes and coincidences.

Steps and Stairs, by Richard Baker.

Works, by Richard Baker. An ongoing theme (started in May 2010) about the incongruity of roadworks, of disruption, health & safety and urban signage.

A collection of incidental bikes, bicycles, cycles and cyclists, by Richard Baker. On the urban road and the pavement, in the wilderness and in the gym. Being ridden, locked up and on their sides.

Runners, by Richard Baker.

A loose gallery of random statues and their relationship with surrounding incidental puns and occurrences.

An on-going and experimental collection of people stoopings and bending downs.

A loose gallery of random spots in the landscape and their relationship with surrounding incidental puns and occurrences.

A loose gallery of random stripes in the landscape and their relationship with surrounding incidental puns and occurrences.

Portraits of Christian crosses and the diagonal versions that erase, alter and identify.

I'm interested in how depictions of the natural world, of wildlife and often an idyllic perspective of tradition, is being absorbed into the pseudo-landscape. This theme will continue so watch this space.

A gallery of images using a deliberate use (or abuse?) of camera blur. Drawn from various sources of long-term projects and individual assignments, they reveal a more abstract aesthetic that might please the eye.

Abstracts, by Richard Baker.

The landscapes and details of the number.

I have to be honest, I'm not sure this is enough of an amusing theme: People on the ground, people lying, people floating and people prone. So let's see where this goes and I'll prove myself right, or wrong. Early days but feedback welcome to richard@bakerpictures.com

A growing series of landscapes that contain only one common denominator.

A gallery of Britain, Britons and Britishness.

Visual coincidences of generic trees. Part of a growing series for during 2012.

Parking No Parking is an idea still in progress. Alongside a Photoshelter series about Britain's recession (called Bust - The Art of Recession, also unfinished), this is a collection of roadside clues about the places that motorists are encouraged to, or warned away from, leaving their vehicles. What I like is the unkempt, the individual and the dereliction of gates and doorways where business or home-owners feel the need to leave curt and officiously hand-painted notices in an otherwise world of uniformity where the printed sign and stencil rule. But there are also the formal parallels of parking bays that criss-cross our town centres that would otherwise been regarded as wastelands, making us keep a tidy order to our state-controlled urban lives. By exploring these two extremes of era and modernity, I hope to produce a group that engage and interest. A blog story about this project is at: http://wp.me/p3fbj-1v

YOU ARE HERE I imagine that the signs which towns and complexes display with a geographical placing may disappear as we increasingly use online mappings. It would, I suggest, be yet another example of an extinction of landscape. While forever being encouraged to explore the great outdoors, the unknown and unfamiliar, our exact whereabouts are now answered immediately using the tech in our pocket. Nonetheless, we're often still left spiritually adrift in the world and the Universe. Always 'Out there somewhere'.