Anyway, What Street Photography Is ?

[Roger Hicks]

First of all, thanks Bill. I kinew it was of the vice presidency but had never verified its origin. Maybe I just misremembered; maybe LBJ quoted it; either way, I now know.

Nightfly: Point fully taken about success in a context, but perhaps this is where I am one of those who doesn't like the term 'street photography'; or to be more accurate, never saw much meaning in the term.

First, it seems to me that there is a distinction between reportage and news photography. Almost all news photography is reportage, but not all reportage is news. I distinguish far less between reportage and documentary photography, in that almost all photography -- including vacation shots -- may in the long run have documentary value. Street photography, infofar as I understand the term (which is barely at all) seems to offer the possibility of being a subset of any of the above, again including vacation shots.

Likewise, your point about photo-as-souvenir is unanswerable, but even photo-as-souvenir can, it seems to me, include a subset called 'street photography'.

As fot photo-as-status, I'm rather less comfortable with this, not least because Cartier-Bresson was a rich kid who could afford to indulge his interest in photographing people. I agree that some people may try to use photography this way, deliberately or unconsciously, but I also believe that the vast majority of people who inflict bad vacation shots on others are unable to separate photo-as-souvenir and photo-as-picture (or record, or art). In other words, they think that their snaps convey all the things they remember, when patently, they don't. One of the basic skills of photography, it seems to me, is learning to 'strain out' your memories as much as possible, and to try to look at the picture as if you had never been there. The basic question is, "What does this picture say, and how?"

So what is the picture 'for'? It sound pretentious, but I suggest that it is to illuminate the human condition. It must spark either "Yes, I know what that feels like" or "I have never experienced that, but thanks to this photograph(er) I begin to understand it." This is the point where the labels 'street', 'reportage' and 'documentary' blur together, leading to my original querying of the need for the term 'street photography' at all.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[Roger Hicks]

. . . But, as with most genres, there are no hard and fast rules; they're not categorized with scientific precision, and are usually recognized as a genre only after the fact.

Dear Joe,

The part I have highlighted seems to me to encapsulate the core of my original suggestion: if a genre is named only after it has come into existence, yet is sufficiently coherent (in the eyes of some) to receive a label, then the label is an ornament; it is not fundamental to the photograph.

Cheers,

R.

 

[noimmunity]

IMHO, street photography is about documenting people going about their daily business in public places.

documenting people...whom the photographer does not know and with whom the only connection is the anonymity of civil society.

To be related to people we don't know is the primary defining moment of modern civil society. Every time you turn on the light switch, for instance, you are instantly related to a whole bunch of people you don't know involved in delivering that power to your switch.

How do people feel about anonymity? How do people feel about anonymity in relation to their photography?

What I see is that there are or can be a lot of different attitudes towards anonymity.

Although I am sometimes tempted, I have decided (for now) that I don't want to live my life as a voyeur of anonymity, nor do I want my photographic hobby to present that kind of relationship. The vast majority of people photographs I take (which is most of what I shoot) are of people I know; otherwise it is of people participating in an event at which I and they are full participants ("participant members").

However, I do get a lot of pleasure from looking at photographs of people whom I don't know taken by people who do.

I especially don't like photographs that show anonymity in a kind of ethnographic or extraterritorial kind of mode.

My tentative conclusion is that there is a difference between strangers (among whom I count myself, to be honest) and anonymity. Does that make any sense?

 

[nightfly]

I don't know much about the written history of street photography or when the term came into use so I can't really address this. My "education" in street photography has come through leaping from one photographer to another out of purely visual interest with little regard to time or place or how they were looked at.

But in any case we are clearly living in a time where street photography is a genre. So if you are taking what has been labeled street photography, I don't see why you wouldn't embrace that label since it is broadly defined and explore what it means?

I think it's safe to say that most of us aren't genre busting photographers. And even most of our heroes weren't. Their photos fall into some pretty well defined areas. Bresson has some portraits of famous people but mostly street photos. Winogrand shot a zillion frames but most of the ones I've seen are street photos (besides a lecture I went to with one of his ex wives that showed family photos which were pretty much like your family photos or mine). Two photographers who I happen to like very much William Klein and Daido Moriyama do strain the genre somewhat but they are both street in their vision. Of course not every photo of every street photographer is purely street (I'm thinking of Moriyama's blurred naked women in hotel rooms) but there is certainly a clearly defined aesthetic that is brought to their other photos which comes from the street.

I guess I don't understand the reluctance to embrace a term that works. I feel like it comes from some combination of hubris ("you can't define my photos") and unwillingness to look at your own work critically.

To me the blanket term "documentary" is the one which is so overly broad as to be useless. It can encompass every photo ever taken.

In an amateur forum like this one particularly, and I use amateur here in the best sense of the word, people who are doing things for the love, being able to define genre and to analyze photos in this context is extremely helpful. If Joe User says this is my street photo and you want to say well, Joe I don't think this works, you need to be able to articulate why.

As you progress in your photos you are invariably going to strain against the genre and push it. But I think this straining and pushing are in themselves a good thing. I guess in my mind good art often comes from people in dialog with and straining against the limitations of the medium and the genre.

 

[Photog9001]

didn't read the whole thing, but i got as far as rh's question about whether it was worth defining. of course it isn't, but to my eyes "street photography" seems to be an internet myth that a lot of people with and without photographic talent use to justify various purchases of (often expensive) tools that aren't that well suited to other kinds of photography. and as with many things that flourish mainly on the www, a lot of time and effort is put into ponderings of questionable value to the "photography".

when "street photography" is at its best, the term is more often than not far away.

 

[user237428934]

Vague, yes, but quite accurate.

View attachment 65845

>> Originally Posted by antiquark
>> IMHO, street photography is about documenting people going about
>> their daily business in public places.

You agreed to the definition of antiquark. But your picture does not fit to that definition at all. I doubt that the daily business of that woman is to walk around with an umbrella in the rain.

Conclusion: either your picture is not street or the definition isn't worth a penny.

I don't think it makes sense to find just another definition for street photography. It would end like in politics: if you found a definition for street that the majority would agree to, it would be a high level definition that leaves room for much interpretation.

 

[Rogrund]

I doubt that the daily business of that woman is to walk around with an umbrella in the rain.

It very much depends on where she lives. 😉

 

[Pherdinand]

In my view 'street photography' is based on the subject of human(s) interacting with each other, with their environment, and/or with the photographer. Does not necessarily need a person in the image since the subject can also be traces left behind by the interaction of humans with bla bla see above.
Of course this definision is not exclusive, i.e. not all photography that presents interaction of humans with bla bla is necessarily street photography.

 

[antiquark]

Conclusion: either your picture is not street or the definition isn't worth a penny.

When I used the term "going about daily business" I was using it as a figure of speech to describe miscellaneous activities, not as a literal description of people working at their occupations.

 

[summaron]

The source of street photography via Cartier Bresson is likely Surrealism, Breton and that group from the 1920's. (Atget was one of the photographers they admired.)

I found these quotes from Peter Galassi helpful. They give some of the basics of street photography:

[Cartier Bresson] said he had been “marked, not by Surrealist painting, but by the conceptions of [André] Breton, [which] satisfied me a great deal; the role of spontaneous expression and of intuition and, above all, the attitude to revolt ... in art but also in life.”
The Surrealists' "destination-less walks of discovery" around the streets of Paris influenced him. Peter Galassi, in his book Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Early Work (Museum of Modern Art, New York), explains: “Alone, the Surrealist wanders the streets without destination but with a premeditated alertness for the unexpected detail that will release a marvellous and compelling reality just beneath the banal surface....
The Surrealists recognised in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings.”

http://http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/nov1999/c-b-n05.shtml

It's interesting that Robert Frank and Lisette Model are not mentioned, at least as far as the United States. Frank was more a street photographer than Cartier Bresson by the 1950's, and was a great influence on the generation of Gary Winograd--a great anxious influence for that group. And Lee Friedlander was first published by Walker Evans, who was also an influence on street photography, though more properly a documentary photographer.

Perhaps the term comes a little from Helen Levitt's work in Spanish Harlem, which went by "In the Street."

James

 

[tomtodeath]

I always liked this definition, copied from http://www.seconds2real.com

For us a good street photographic image encloses the following qualities:
- interesting
- from a real, public and everyday surrounding
- well observed, documentary and authentical
- mostly direct and near
- grasps a certain aspect or decisive
moment of an exemplary scene
- the content is more important than
technical circumstances
- will mostly contain people, however, it
does not mandatory have to