I'm lost with "Street Photography" definition.

How about everything on the street, which is candid and not setup in advance is "the street"? "No people" including, you have no authority to remove people from the street, I believe 🙂
 
malland said:
Since some people seem to be in mood to define things, let's define this thread: "a thread about nothing."

MITCH ALLAND/Potomac, MD
Do You Know What is Really Real?
Download link for PDF file of 15-shot portfolio
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Ko.Fe. said:
🙄

Sometimes we define things as "nothing" because we aren't capable to see, read or understand. 😎
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Sounds like Seinfeld needs to do a TV Episode on "Street Photography" 😀, (since his original pitch was for a show about "Nothing")
 
  • Sometimes, we want define a genre so we can restrict the images that match it...
  • Sometimes, we want to try to emulate what the genre meant decades ago.. like <street photography> as defined by Henry Cartier Bresson, or Robert Capa...
  • Some want no guidelines, regardless of the more specific genre under the greater genre of photography in general.
But, having a few guidelines in some genres asks of the photographer to work a bit harder to achieve what the genre is intended to reveal and/or portray as defined when it became a new style.

This way, that genre has a more specific type of image needed to meet it's guidelines.

Then, some of us try to hold onto the original intent.. in our photographs. To keep the Genre from straying to a less specific intent, where photos that clearly are well outside the intended photos for that genre, are now accepted to be a part of that genre.
That is what causes any genre to stray, and hence, this topic from the OP'r is created to discuss what has happened to the genre (in this case <street photography>)


Many images in any genre can be placed sub-genre's... at some point, maybe those sub-genre's becomes a main genre.

And many images can fit in many sub-genre's and will fit in a larger genre in more general way, but, may not fit the original genre in that category as defined as a more strict guideline,
original intent of the main genre term (like Street Photography as the <main> genre with many sub-genre's)

Yes, every generation wants to <re>define the guidelines that may be an old established regime for decades..

Me, I tend to keep Street Photography to it's old time genre...(HCB, and others forward who excelled in this type of candid photography)

It is a very hard genre to get good at, let alone to master.
It really does make you think and consider if the photo will tell a story w/o a title.
Will it make you connect with experiences in your life, that you can share the moment that is presented before you?
This ^^ is the hard part of Street Photography....from what I can gather.
 
I'll point out that those of us that know what street photography is take a lot of street photography pictures. That some of you are so literal that you take street to mean a strip of tar is odd too and that some dont see the point of a definition is important when you dont know what street is ...is hilarious. Its not candid either by the way but candid photography absolutely is a subset.
As a by the way, the wiki was pirated by a dill some time ago and even includes the remark about the invention of the candid camera. Its so corrupted now that no one can be bothered to fix it.

There are others here that dont like the term street photography and its weird to say the least. It a way for us to find the others and we dont really care if someone doesnt understand because we are NOT looking for them, there is enough of them and therein the problem. Its not an exclusive society, it simply requires that one knows what it is and we are faced with many that participate but just dont know and cannot be bothered to find out. It is also not social documentary either although it can be a subset. Urban does not require people to be in the street photograph and is about the human aspect, it can have people in it but the main theme is the environment and in terms of its humanity. As an example, an oil spill is documentary but if the swirls of oil were an aesthetic, then it might easily be urban ...or even art.
I can define street photography, in fact I wrote the wiki before it was corrupted. I wont define it for anyone here, its for you to find just as the rest of us did.
And I'll remind you again. Those of us that do it ...do it repeatedly and so the proof is self evident. It can be many things but they are all associated with a core meaning that when someone understands they can work at its boundary or even be creative and make the boundary of the domain bend but only as long as the definition is known. We say there are no rules because of the freedom that is possible but of course there are a few like anything that can be defined. It is not landscape photography, it is not macro photography, it is not studio portrait photography so it should be obvious to someone here that it does have a definition as a natural order of things.

The variety that is possible is why most are confused, just as a seascape without trees might confuse someone with expectations that there be land and you landscape photographers would call that just plain stupid and if you see something in street that you dont understand then it is likely you are looking at a photographer that doesn't know either.
 
I don't know about you all, but I take pictures of streets.

No, seriously. As an architecture student, probably the bulk of my photography in number of frames is of urban spaces, people or not.
 
airfrogusmc said:
Like what Winogrand had to say about it.
about 45 seconds in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RM9KcYEYXs
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Winogrand says he is a zoo photographer and that he doesnt know. It also should be said that in his time there was a thing called a street photographer, a hustler on the streets that would take your girlfriend's/mistress/wife pic and then offer to sell it to you. They dont exist now and even winogrand isnt here to explain his often confused ideas.
 
He is saying that those kinds of labels are silly and I agree. I am guilty of usuing the term to describe my work but I really think of my work as just photography. I like this quote by Adams about categories:

"Let us hope that categories will be less rigid in the future; there has been to much of placing photography into little niches-commercial, pictorial, documentary, and creative(a dismal term). Definitions of this kind are inessential and stupid; good photography remains good photography no matter what we name it. I would like to think of "just photography"; of each and every photograph containing the best qualities in proper degree to achieve its purpose. We have been slaves to categories, and each has served as a kind of concentration camp for the spirit."-Ansel Adams

That was written 70 + years ago. It has only gotten worse.
 
Ansel said:
Gary Winogrand really objected to being called a "street photographer". Enough said!
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...What did Clinton say or Nixon or any other, what is anyone of any significance saying. Right now even Putin is saying it wasn't them.

People ridicule winogrand for what he says then when it suits them he is dragged out. He's not even here ...maybe no one noticed.
Very bad form to put words into a dead mouth and why bother when there are plenty of lies to be found with the living. I'm still wondering why Ansel got a mention ...and what the heck he said.
 
oneANT said:
I'll point out that those of us that know what street photography is take a lot of street photography pictures. That some of you are so literal that you take street to mean a strip of tar is odd too and that some dont see the point of a definition is important when you dont know what street is ...is hilarious. Its not candid either by the way but candid photography absolutely is a subset.
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Huh? So, if you know what it is you do it? Why? One can know what it is and don't do it.

I can define street photography, in fact I wrote the wiki before it was corrupted. I wont define it for anyone here, its for you to find just as the rest of us did.
Click to expand...
You claim you wrote the Wikipedia page, you claim that it is now corrupted, but you don't want to share the definition with us? Even when you write "that some dont see the point of a definition is important when you dont know what street is ...is hilarious"? I don't get it.... Especially as I think I know what street is and I think the Wikipedia definition is on the money.

On a side note: how do you turn off the music on your site? I hate music on websites and after looking at three or four pictures I left your site 'cause it wasn't easy to turn off the music. Too bad as you seem a very capable photographer...
 
Street photographs emerge somewhere/anywhere in the spectrum between surrealism and social documentary. There are a few other genre influences that give a street photograph its character, and sometimes it borrows more from this and sometimes more from that, but surrealism and social documentary are, on some level, fundamental. Broad as this is, it can't be narrowed further down, because if you do (say, by giving a hard and fast definition), you 'll end up excluding examples from the street photographic canon that you wouldn't want to exclude on second thought. But not having a precise definition is OK -- it's worth recalling, street photography, like all photography, is a practice, not an axiomatic system like Euclidean geometry.

Reactions to nomenclature are probably due to the fact that a lot of street photography fails to live up fully to its name.(e.g. not all of it is made in the street and, in fact, neither does it have to be in a public place or have people in it, even those ones who obligingly jump over pools). In reality that is no more of a problem than any word or phrase that has deviated in meaning from its etymological origin. (There are many examples, some given above.) You need some buzzword to collect together diverse work having certain fuzzy characteristics. Let's all agree to call it XYZ, or whatever, if street photography has a such bad ring about it or if it makes Winogrand turn in his grave. We'll still have to call it something for purposes of brevity and generality.

As for Winogrand, he hated the term because he probably exasperated at the pigeonholing. Who can blame him, esp. if it involved a very narrow interpretation, lumping together work in a dismissive manner (as was the case with some of the criticism around the 70's) and glossing over the specifics that distinguished what he was doing. But, truth be told, he also wasn't someone who seemed to be deeply interested in the theory of photography. I am not saying he wasn't aware of theoretical discussions. But he just seemed a little too diffusive and disinterested to pursue them. Every time a theoretical discussion came up in one of his interviews or lectures (the ones that are available to us), he looked/sounded like he had rather been elsewhere, preferably somewhere taking photos. I say this with affection for Winogrand. And, to be honest, it's OK, you don't need to be a theoretician of photography in order to be a photographer, even a great one. Which of course he was. Great photographer, that is.


.
 
oneANT said:
...That some of you are so literal that you take street to mean a strip of tar is odd too and that some dont see the point of a definition is important when you dont know what street is ...is hilarious...
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Absolutely, when I wrote that this was a "thread about nothing" I was referring to the manner in which this was being discussed, not that there was no point in defining it or discussing it — or that it was difficult to understand.

MITCH ALLAND/Potomac, MD
Bangkok Hysteria [Direct download link for pdf file for book project]
 
oneANT said:
It took me a second to work out what Ansel was saying or if you were misusing a quotation out of its proper context. If this is the correct context then it is just the weirdest thing a thinking person could say.

He is saying that he wished everyone would look at landscape and not just the genre that they are most fond of.
...this is not even winogrand stuff and is likely the most stupid thing I have ever heard.


Maybe if Uncle Albert had written about it you could find more suitable quotes there ...
https://ia600409.us.archive.org/24/items/unclealbertsmanu00perruoft/unclealbertsmanu00perruoft.pdf
It shouldn't go unnoticed too that you yourself post in street photography forums and as street photography.

Seriously ...this is the most stupid thing I have ever heard and was it really said by Adams ...are we REALLY talking about the same Ansel. I'm gobsmacked.
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I am not misusing a quote by Adams. He is pretty clear about what he means as is Winogrand.

Nixon, Clinton yeah thats relevant LoL...

Just take photographs. Why worry about if someone thinks it's this or that? Categories and labels are for those that need those kinds of things. Most great artists of any kind just create and let folks that need to put things into categories do that.

If you read what I said (post #54) I use the term but that doesn't mean I like it or think categories are really helpful to the creative process. In fact I think as Adams did that they are destructive to creativity.
 
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