James D Fell’s photography captures urban people and scenes without ever succumbing to sentimentality or snarkiness. His subjects do what city people do: they phone, window shop, meditate, push prams, carry dogs, sell produce—and are almost always on the move.  Using bright dashes of colour, Fell plucks them out of their quotidian surroundings and makes them into distinct individuals rather than types.

The sign held by a young boy at a demonstration reading “I am somebody” spells this out literally, but we find it everywhere in Fell’s work pictorially. Using the structural elements offered by the urban environment—shop windows, the receding horizon lines of streets and sidewalks, vertical frames and poles as well as color—Fell frames his subjects and opens up to us their emotional states of being.

In the series “Urbania” we see a blue bow-tied dandy strutting self-confidently down a city street with a large bag swinging in front of him: this is a man who truly delights in shopping! In another picture we have a placid museum guard who sits framed by a glass door; the blue shirt of his uniform is illuminated as if he were a work of art himself.

In Fell’s picture of a Palestinian protester the point is psychological and not political. The poster she carries is upside down and its message is at first glance unreadable. Our attention is drawn instead to the brilliant red magenta sleeves of her sweater, which contrast sharply with the green of her cuffs. The black hood, the gaunt face, and the vertically positioned handle of the placard complete a study in perseverance, uprightness, and fiery devotion to a cause. 

 Fell’s black and white photos are artistically no less compelling than the color ones. In one photo in the “Urbania” series there is a marvelous formal contrast between the extravagantly frizzy head of a woman passerby and the neatly cropped hair of the man in front of her. She is smiling apologetically at the photographer while awkwardly clutching a water bottle and some clothes, whereas the sleek young man striding out of the picture remains closed to us: his dark round sunglasses render his gaze opaque. 

Other pictures demonstrate a subtle mastery of background composition. The Orthodox Jew sleeping peacefully on his hand in the London tube seems to be dreaming of the blurry white-gray reflection above his upper right arm—his religious garb, the soft line of his hand, and the shadowy reflection suggest spiritual meditation rather than simple sleep.  The photo of a young woman focusing her camera on some unseen object is made complete by a giant arrow in a window across the street: the arrow aligns almost perfectly with her lens and seems to be transporting the light waves of what she is photographing directly into the camera.

 All in all, Fell causes the everyday people he photographs to stand out in their everyday surroundings: they are vibrant individual participants in the city and not its stereotypical, anonymous victims.