Is Street Photography Dead?

Is Street Photography Dead?

  • Yes

    Votes: 82 20.6%

  • No

    Votes: 317 79.4%
  • Total voters
    399
Margu said:
here i would disagree. video is the premium medium for documentary today and the only one. your location says canada and i like millions of people around the world happen to see the video of the teenage boy shot in a streetcar in toronto. in fact if it was not for that video the whole thing would have been just another police shooting but now there seem to be a big backlash.


in other words people should stop thinking that random photos on the street has some documentary value, it does not.
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My second and current job is - television and broadcast.
This video you are referring to is good example why still is better.
It was no boy, it was 18 years old dope smoking dude with knife.

Good illustration how U-tube video on smart-phone is "good" to give correct information.

To me here is no documentary in the video where someone get shot.

My location is where it is shown. But I'm from Moscow, originally.
The only true documentary source of daily life I use to see how it is changing where I used to be is street photography.
Video can't catch the moment as good as photography. Technically.

Speaking with 20+ years in professional video experience.
 
jsrockit said:
So, documenting one small time frame was enough... photography is all about redundancy. However, times change as does everything around us and those changes are worth documenting.

You can never photograph the same thing as someone else.
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I was not implying that any degree of redundancy has rendered documentation worthless, but I was remarking on the presentation, whereby overt originality, at least in the since of being groundbreaking, is increasingly difficult, though not impossible, in this particular genre. Proof of this is through simple observation.

When a radically new medium or genre starts, the field for potentially establishing not just a signature style but also one that creates a new landscape within the genre is broader than it is for those exercising the same medium and genre decades down the road. This is not to say that originality is ever easy, even at the beginning, and the "masters" of street largely earned their titles.

"You can never photograph the same thing as someone else."

True, and if it weren't true, I might just put away the camera. But deferring to a genre's style, and that it is to what I was referring, is certainly not impossible---that's, after all, what mostly establishes the semantic---so it really becomes to what extent "originality," beyond the inherent uniqueness of any photo by anyone, is relevant. And if it is, then, what I was stating, street photography, even in its broadest terms, nevertheless maintains a certain simplicity and directness that limits extensive divergence, at least on the surface.

Again, I point to rock music, where certain watershed movements have slowed in frequency. And I would contend that to some extent, it is the intrinsic simplicity and directness of the music's form that has complicated efforts to generate a new movement without sounding like Spinal Tap's 'free jazz' incarnation.

This is not to say that rock is dead, or that it should die, and certainly there are some great acts, and certainly there are unique acts, but to the point of creating a movement within the genre, that's less so.

Similarly, street photography has reached, and understandably so, a maturity whereby producing something so influentially different that it stylistically redirects a visible mass of practitioners has become increasingly elusive.

None of this undermines the importance of the genre, and absolutely, the mere fact that one person or one building photographed one day may not exists the next day or that the every person's input is within itself unique provide more than enough credence to the importance and value of basically any style of photography.
 
Margu said:
comparing music where extensive training and talent is required to play some basic stuff to an activity where anyone can pick a camera and point at stuff on the street, or copy the photos they have seen of others is not really a good comparison.

comparing music like jazz to street photography is like comparing a NASA scientist to a worker in mcdonalds.
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Well, highbrow judgements aside, I was comparing them from the point of view of someone who isn't interested. Jazz isn't a mainstream music type and many people don't care about it.... therefore, it's useless to them. That was my point... it is only useless if you don't care about it.
 
biomed said:
This is pretty much true for all types of photography. More and more photos that years ago used to reside in a shoebox in the hall closet are now publically exhibited as a result of the proliferation of digital cameras and the internet. The world has turned into one big "1 Hour" photo kiosk.
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So true! For a while I was getting really frustrated, and then I realized that I just had to weed through the crap to get to the good stuff, whereas previously editors and curators had been doing all the work for me. I don't think things are worse. . . it's just that now we get to see ALL of it.
 
daveleo said:
For me, it's dead in the sense that we've seen it all 1000 times before.

What else is new? Another kid chasing a balloon? Some babe in a miniskirt, lighting a cigarette and glaring at us? Another homeless person? A couple in a cafe reading the paper over espressos?

Yeh, it's a good picture, but . . . it really needs a distinct edge to stand out, you know.
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Depressingly true. But I think that's true for all of straight photography. Hasn't all of this been done many times before, and probably better than (speaking only for myself) I can do it?
 
I am a newby here, but have always wondered about the "rules" pertaining to taking pictures of people on the street.
Do you ask them first?; hide your camera?; take a "secret" picture?
What about a release from someone for publishing their picture say to a sight like this one?

I am a little shy about getting too close, but have read many times that "close" is important.
Thank you
 
I think we all get to hung up on labels. I think a great photograph is a great photograph period. I don't think when a great photographer is creating he is thinking "I'm going to go out and create a _______ type of photograph today." I think they just go out and create.

I really like this quote by Adams and I totally agree.
"Lets hope that categories will be less rigid in the future; there has been too much of placing photography in 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 it as 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

The one truth is in over 2,000 + years of 2 dimensional art everything has been done. I mean everything. the key is to take in all of your influences mix it up and in some way make it all yours.

Many like Winogrand hated the label street photographer. Really, they were just photographers. Their work just happen to use the street and the urban environment as a vehicle for their vision.

Just create honestly and don't worry if it's fitting into any preconceived category and in my opinion it really doesn't matter. There is still plenty of things that need to explored so just go out and create.
 
Actually there are a number of good street photography groups on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/1699853@N22/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/oculi/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/streetphotographers/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/extremestreet/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/elitestreet/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/small_growers_street_association_/

etc. They can provide a nice sample of what is good and innovating in the street photography of today.

Sure, a lot of pictures there are obviously trying to emulate Manos, Webb, Parr, Gilden or Moriyama. But quite often shots posted in such groups show true originality and freshness of approach. What makes a picture great is not what one borrows from predecessors, but what s/he adds new (stylistically and thematically). I can't think of any great name in the history of art that wasn't influenced by the tradition that shaped him. (BTW, I find the early work of Manos to look very Eugene. W. Smith-ish, while Parr, at least starting the early 80s, is avowedly trying to recover the visual language of advertising photography.)

Crude portraits of hobos isn't street photography in my book. It actually isn't photography at all, if we are to understand photography as an artistic endeavor.
 
Dirk said:
Depressingly true. But I think that's true for all of straight photography. Hasn't all of this been done many times before, and probably better than (speaking only for myself) I can do it?
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Yeh, this is true. I am thinking that if the title of this thread was
"Is [ ______ ] photography dead?", I probably would have chimed in with the same reply.

In fact there is a lot of great stuff out there, and I should not be so negative.
 
IMO the problem is that we today's technology everyone can makes photo, correctly exposed (more or less), in focus and with brilliant colors (or easily converted to B&W).
But it is not enough to go on a street and shoot a few or many frames to have an interesting photograph. Subject, light, composition, moment come into play. Its true, as bogdanb pointed there are now good street photos around, but the large quantity are just snaps. Not dead but overwhelmed in the bulk. My opinion which could be wrong, of course.
robert
 
Margu said:
street photography is not dead but its useless, which is worst.

however walking is always useful, seeing the world is always useful and if street photography is your excuse to that than continue doing it... just don't accumulate debt financing GAS.
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Hard to argue with that.


Actually, photography "as a thing by itself" is pretty much dead and been dead for a while. Smart phones finished it off.
Nicely done well executed picture (baryta paper, controlled highlights, etc. and all that jazz) is not a treasure by itself, too easy to do with modern camera, and if you managed that with 1935 Leica- well, that's your business, 99.9% people could care less...
As a tool- yes, it's probably alive, although I think it is to a large degree superseded by video, multimedia, etc.
"Decisive moment" and all that- well it's really good the first 1500 times, then get's a bit old, in my opinion.
 
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