Andrew Stark, documentaryphotographer.

Using a purely candid, documentary style, photographer Andrew Stark has captured his home city Sydney, Australia in gritty, grainy 35mm black & white for over twenty years. Like the city itself his photographs are youthful, vibrant and often wryly humourous, yet many sub themes run throughout as Stark whispers of struggle, of a city caught between old ways and new opportunities.
Passively stalking the movements of the harbour city, Andrew Stark has traipsed every crumbling square of bitumen inner Sydney has to traverse. His unobtrusive, second hand SLR, stealing painlessly, moments of poetic candor from the unsuspecting faces in the street.
His quest began during the early 1980s when employment in a black & white darkroom combined with inspiration from a book by the great Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson nudged him out onto the streets to try his luck. Shooting
anyone and anything he soon found that what Henri
made look so easy, isnt ! Subsequently his
photographic influences have branched out to include
master candid practitioners, Garry Winogrand, William
Klein, Tony Ray-Jones, Roger Scott, Louis Faurer and
his greatest inspiration Robert Frank. By the late
1980s street photography had become a way of life and
   the body of work, published in 2003 as the book,
   "Snaps from Sydney" was already well underway.
   Wandering the streets, hunting, searching, willing the moment to be poetic. Always working within a non interference discipline where absolutely anything goes so long as you remain within the 'candid' framework. The historical or truth dimension to the work has always been vitally important.
Stark explains, "I genuinely believe photography to be at it's most potent when underscored by truth. To contrive is to control and frankly I'm more interested in observation than direction. Riding the ebb and flow of Sydney's streets, approaching the next corner afresh, never quite knowing what may present itself in the adjoining street. That's the random beauty of street photography. Control has to be a stultifying, creative brake. The magic, emotion charged moments are in my experience invariably captured using an almost sub conscious process, they must never be orchestrated and can rarely be dogmatically collated."