Every season, as the fashion world travels from New York to London, Milan and Paris, Simbarashe Cha is outside the shows, photographing what people are actually wearing on the street for The New York Times. His work also takes him far beyond the Western fashion capitals, from Tokyo to Dakar.
It wasn’t until later in life that Cha realised this was the work he wanted. He spent his twenties trying to make it in music, worked for years in a bank and didn’t buy his first camera until he was 32. Getting from there to here took a documentary about the legendary street style photographer Bill Cunningham, years of practice and a few happy accidents. Even now, he says, it hasn’t quite sunk in.
Cha joins Amed to talk about why practice makes permanent, the blind spot he had to admit to himself and why the style he looks for is meant to feel within reach.
Key Insights:
- Cha’s writing matters as much as his photography to his career. His blog began as a writing exercise, and the camera was a way to find material: “let me just find cool things to photograph that I can then write about that people might be interested to read.”
- Practice only helps if you also change what isn’t working. Cha drew on Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, Bill Simmons’s writing on athletes “putting in reps” and a Wells Fargo colleague’s correction: “practice makes permanent.” He committed to shooting “every single day regardless of the weather, regardless of how I feel.” He also changed how he approached strangers, because “in the beginning, more people said no than yes.”
- The Times hired Cha for his eye before it knew about his fashion work. He photographed the 2020 protests in New York the same way he photographed people on the street. “I always wanted to capture photos that made a viewer want to be in the space,” he says. A year later, an editor learned he had a whole decade’s worth of fashion photography and assigned him Christian Siriano’s show.
- Cha’s freedom at the Times depends on his editors’ trust. His Style Outside city stories mean about two weeks embedded in a place to “learn the speed of the city,” he says. “They kind of just trust me to … photograph and write and find people.”
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