Help me understand street photography

sjw617 said:
The depression started in the US but did go worldwide.
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Not to our part of the world.
We had our own great depression for fifty years in the eastern european block. Plenty of stuff to connect to, for myself, and plenty of memories of my own. So e.g. as a side note, i can't be objective about it, and i find it ridiculous when somebody is touting communism in somewhere on the west, with a fat bank account, a car in his garage, never lived and experienced the real side of the idea.

Anyway.
As i said i am NOT connected to the great depression in ANY way. And still, i can relate to that image.
Maybe i like it, maybe it provokes feelings in me even without being connected to the historical background. Why is that so unbelievable? It's a good image, after all, and one does not necessarily have to know all the circumstances in order to appreciate a good image (like poetry, or painting, or music).
People like blues music even in 2008, although not too many have anyhting to do with the black slaves of long time ago, do they?

Maybe i am just more optimistic regarding the future, than some others here. That's fine i guess. :)
 
Framing these sitemistic pics Raid?, one by one.

Cheers,
Ruben
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Hello Ruben,

A house has only so many walls. In the end, the walls are filled sufficiently with framed photos. Now what is next?

When I was an older teenager, I had photos of rock bands all over the walls of my room in Baghdad. One day, our little neighbor girl [maybe 5] commented to me that "you still have the ceiling for posting photos". What a smart little girl she was.
 
If we aren't provided with historical references for photos, what happens? Conversely, to what degree does that reference influence us?

If we see a photo of an American women in the Depression, but are not told she is an American or when the photo was taken, would we be any more or any less empathetic?

Is the primary value of a photo to produce empathy? If it is, then the value of a photo is dramatically influenced by something apart from the photo, i.e., what someone else tells us is going on in the photo.
 
Sitemistic - this is becoming an exercise in common (mis)understanding. I think the opposition to the war is what was being praised.

Ducky, who began this, has ducked out. I'm about to follow.

Cheers
Frank:) :) :
 
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mhv said:
Street photography is dead. It's a figment in the imagination of rich fourtysomething white men who invested in expensive rangefinder equipment while caressing the hope of being the next HCB or Doisneau, or whatnont. It's also a figment in the imagination of enthusiast twentysomethings who got their first K1000. It's also a figment in the imagination of the thirtysomething who got his first DSLR and is looking for a quick way to make it useful, because he bought the tool before thinking about the applications. His résumé usually contains pictures of kids, flowers, and previous girlfriends.

It's about people who think that a sneaky shot, whether it's from the front or from the back, still reveals something new about reality.

The problem is that "street photo" never existed. People took pictures of things for various reasons: documentary, commercial, editorial, war reporting, etc. But in the realm of hobby, you need taglines for style and content, so when you're aping the particular style and content of Doisneau and HCB, you're a "street photographer."

But Doisneau and HCB were not "street photographers." They were photographers. HCB stopped taking pictures in the last few years of his life because he couldn't stand, among other things, seeing his approach everywhere in the hands of everyone.

So yes, yes, someone will say "But what about the work of XYZ! He is young, brilliant, original, and street-savvy as well!" Well exactly. He's who he is and you're not. The fact that he does "street" is irrelevant.

In my opinion, William Eggleston is as much a "street photographer" than any of the usual darlings because it so happens that most of his photos were taken in a street. Yet he looks nothing like Winogrand, nothing like HCB, nothing like Doisneau. That's because he's a photographer, not a guy with too much time and no ideas about his hobby.

Sorry for all the bitterness, it's just easier to articulate a point by cranking the amp at 11...
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Hi,

I haven't got the will to read the whole thread, so pardon me if this has been covered earlier.

After reading your post this morning, I went out to take picture, I also thought a bit about your take on the subject.

Can you tell what it is that makes a photograph "non-documentary"?

Let me explain, it's fairly simple, the resulting photograph of a guy who shoots landscapes documents how nice a landscape or a sunset is/was. The same can apply to a macro shot of a fly, or a shot of a tiger taken with a telephoto.

HCB took pictures of Ghandi minutes before he(Ghandi) was assassinated, what if you photograph someone crossing the road and they become history later in the day?

So, what is it that makes a "non-documentary" photograph?
 
Well it has taken me a while to get caught up on this thread from yesterday - kids all over me, making breakfast, disposing of the Christmas tree, other interruptions - but now I have a cup of coffee and a free moment.

IMO "street photography" is the result of self exploration, not self definition. One interposes the camera between one's self and the "real" world, and makes images to reduce the confusion into manageable chunks. One picks out the images for display that best expresses one's worldview, while simultaneously using those same images to internally define and refine that worldview.

I have a nephew who spent time in his 17th year taking snapshots of street scenes with a Lomo Fisheye duct-taped to the nose of his skateboard. He grew out of it. Now at 18 he is using a digital camera to shoot "street" images that express his anti-corporate angst, and shots of his and his friends' bands. I think he has a good eye. He thinks he is documenting reality. For him this is true and valuable, whatever I think of it.

One can engage in this form of self exploration at any age and for many reasons. In my experience, I need to do it less often and with less intensity as the decades pass.

BTW - a great image is timeless and "worthy" free of its historical context. By "worth" I mean simply that it moves somewhat more than 50% of viewers to feel something other than boredom when they view it. For example, cave paintings are still powerful images to some, though the historical narrative in which they were created is long gone.
 
sitemistic said:
The Vietnam war was the finest moment of the American people? I don't know anyone who feels that way.
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No sitemistic, I have been absolutely misunderstood by you. The massive street opposition to that war has been he finest moment of the American people.

You have seen lately at RFF many voices inpeaching the Americans for their feeling of superiority, for their actions at Iraq, etc. All these as if America was a single block.

The opposition to the Vietnam war showed in the most clear cut way that the Americans at the people level can show a hand of solidarity against their government policies.

Hystorically this opposition had key importance in stopping the war, and in the 20th century in general. At the internal American level, this crisis has had a tremendous impact.

By the way, I would be extremely glad if you could show some of your photographic work at the time..

Cheers,
Ruben
 
sjw617 said:
The depression started in the US but did go worldwide.
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Not really. The impact in e.g. Tibet was negligible.

In one sense this is a silly counter-argument but in another it is a useful counterbalance to thinking that only Europe and America (and consumerist capitalism) matter.

Cheers,

R.
 
sitemistic said:
. The idea that we are somehow made better by learning from the mistakes in history is a myth on both a personal and a social level. We do not learn from out parents mistakes, we make the same mistakes ourselves. We do not learn from the mistakes of past wars, we start wars ourselves.

We do not have to make an effort to record photographically anymore. Our surroundings and people and culture are being recorded on flickr at 5,000 photos a minute. To me, street photography simply adds to that noise without rising above it.
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We are sufficiently far apart here, despite apparently being within a few months of one another in age -- I'm 58 next birthday -- that there seems little hope of mutual understanding.

I (and many like me) would argue that it is precisely because of an abysmal knowledge of history that people repeat past errors. e.g. Afghanistan.

I also believe in quality and advocacy, e.g. one 'Migrant Mother' is worth at least 10,000 Flickr photos; one 'Modest Proposal' from Swift is worth an entire internet forum.

It would be easy to turn this into a 'wise Europe -- ignorant America' thread except that I believe that this is substantially incorrect and beside the point. It's individuals, not nations.

Cheers,

R.
 
chikne said:
Can you tell what it is that makes a photograph "non-documentary"?
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You're stretching a little bit my words. When I said that there are purposes like documentary &c which I opposed to the hobbyist's purposes, I am talking about primary purpose. Yes, a photo is almost always documentary, but in many cases that's a secondary purpose. You take a photo of a beautiful girl for the cover of a magazine in order to make sure historians know about her, or because this is an assignment and part of your job? Obviously, the historian of fashion in 50y may derive useful information from your work, but you did not intend it to be as such.

Look at Cindy Sherman's pictures from the Untitled Film Stills. They are fictional, not documentary, even though there was a real person at a moment in time before the camera. But someone writing her bio in 50 years will be able to infer a bit about what she looked like.

A "documentary" photo is like a "documentary" movie. It was made EXPRESSLY for the purpose of conveying as truthful an information as could be about a specific topic.
 
A Plea To Ducky

A Plea To Ducky

Ducky,

If you're still reading this thread, I beg you not to start others like

"Help me understand:

Minimalistic Photography"

Abstract Photography"

Conceptual Photography"


Actually, I have enjoyed this entertaining discussion.

willie
 
sitemistic said:
....
Unfortunately, we as a country apparently learned nothing from it. When someone finally did actually attack us, we started a war with another country unconnected with that attack. It was the action of fools.
.....
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I do still believe in the intelligence of the American people. Although hystorical processes take long time to materialize.

And please, show some photos of that period.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
Roger Hicks said:
...a United States of America is probably less bad than the Balkanization that would have followed a Southern victory in the War Between the States.
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Actually, Balkanization existed during and following the revolution, under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution's fundamental purpose was, and is, to prevent it.
 
Roger Hicks said:
It would be easy to turn this into a 'wise Europe -- ignorant America' thread except that I believe that this is substantially incorrect and beside the point.

R.
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Incorrect, indeed. Evidence of European wisdom before, say, the mid-nineties, is welcome.:rolleyes:

One of the fundamental threads of history, often forgotten, is how much Americans have always defined ourselves as people who are not European. We see our presence here as the result of European failures. Perhaps not historically accurate, but fables carry more weight.
 
Imagine if we had a photographic record of street scenes in ancient Rome, or Athens in 1200 BC or Paris in 1300, or London in 1623.

I'd be thrilled to look at even the most mundane shots. The best we have is Pompeii.


sitemistic said:
Roger, it is, to me, unlike other forms of photography. As you probably know from reading my posts, I do not think most photography is of much lasting value. I think photos are meaningful only over a couple of generations, after which the context is lost because time has changed us in such a way that new generations can't really understand the images they are looking at.
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That's true. An Australian, but born American, with an American accent, pretending to be Scottish and not even getting the facts right.

Is it any wonder that we drink?

Ernst
 
One of the fallacies that we all carry around with us is that everyone wants to live in a benign democratic state in which everyone is free to go about their own business.

The truth is different. Savagery usually ends either when all the combatants die or when an outside power imposes a resolution. Few societies have peacefully made a transition to democracy. (I'd argue Europe's transitions in the last couple of decades represent an exception and come only after bleeding itself and large portions of the world on the altar of combat and conquest for a couple of millenia.)

BTW, isn't Mel Gibson an Ozzie?
 
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