Win Coates - Photographic Style

Photographic Style

Win Coates had a unique Vérité style of photography. He used only a single-lens Leica camera that he would generally keep out of sight, often engaging a person in casual conversation to distract them, until he saw his moment. He would then lift the camera and snap a picture, in many cases not looking through the viewfinder. Often people did not know he was taking pictures. Among his surviving portfolio can be seen the results of this candor—subjects caught off guard or mostly unawares—even though they are looking toward the photographer. The difference is that they are egaged with the photographer as a person and not his camera, which would cause them to consider how they appear. In other cases he captures people and events completely off-guard. The results are unusual and often reveal how a person relates to a living person instead of how they might wish to be perceived in posterity. Thus he captured people as they actually appeared in meeting them, while other photographers might have captured the subject's preferred self-conscious position. The result is unusual—people sometimes looking "at" the camera, but not posing.