Street Photography clichés, no no's and taboos.

[Black]

Me too😉

Ps: you post something, i disagree with it- i say what i think of it- that is my contribution to this topic.
You can dislike it or whatever, but you can't expect that we all agree with your point of view... If thats what you are after start a blog where you can control replies or better yet, write a book.

I wasn't personal at all.
I didn't say chris this and that is such and such. I just wrote what i thought of this only thread- your OP and many replies. To some replies i answered stg concretely since they had a different topic.
The only way you could take this as personal attack is if you'd define yourself 100% equal with the post you started and nothing more than that. Which i guess is not the case.
Hell, for what i know of you you could be albert effin einstein, or my favorite brother in law. We could be best friends in life. Or at least i m sure there are some things we would agree upon.
I just happen to find one thought of yours worthless, thats all🙂

I don't think any question is worthless, unless it has been definitively answered and that answer was made easily available to the masses. But I respect your right to find my post worthless.

 

[Pherdinand]

Thanks for that😉

 

[Dan]

Confusing the originality/interesting quality of the subject with the originality/interesting qualities of a photograph is a biggest misconception of all to me.
Interesting subject- mediocre picture (will i be banned for this?)

Well said. The act of documenting does not very often lead to art making.

 

[alistair.o]

Well said. The act of documenting does not very often lead to art making.

I would think that nicely sums up Robert Frank's body of work: The Americans.

 

[telenous]

The problem is not so much with ordinary photographs. These are obviously ephemeral objects, they die the moment they were born. The bigger problem (for me) is with successful but obvious iterations of well-known photographs from the past. It may be a poodle jumper, a gypsy holding the portrait of their progenitor (ideally a genetic lookalike from another century), a vision of a body through a condensed window, a tilted frame of life in the street as it unfolds, cutting like a knife in the thick of it. I could go on (about other genres too). The street photography genre is populated by giants and the influences very often tend to be burdens. It's difficult to do it successfully, even harder not to end up with obvious and/or dreadful pastiche. The more you know about photography, the more you realize how very narrow the road to something genuinely interesting and original is.

That said, it doesn't hurt to try.

.

 

[robert blu]

Today has become easy to make a photo, much more difficult to make a good photo.
The same applies to street photography, easy "to take" a photo on the street, much more difficult "to make "a good interesting photo on the street. Just my idea.
robert

 

[telenous]

Today has become easy to make a photo, much more difficult to make a good photo.
The same applies to street photography, easy "to take" a photo on the street, much more difficult "to make "a good interesting photo on the street. Just my idea.
robert

It's hard/rare to make a good street photo, no doubt about that. Maybe that's part of the appeal too. ("Here, this time I'll go out and take that one great street photo I've always been after".) I even agree that on some level it is easier to make photos today, what with all the camera marvels at our disposal. But on another level it is more difficult. In old photos, people in the street seem more relaxed or indifferent in having their photo taken. I think there was a point, say some time in the 70s or maybe a bit earlier than that, when people became much more sophisticated about the way they "read" photos, principally by being bombarded by images which they then tried to make sense of. They also assumed, for the first time, a sense of ownership about their image. At that point in time, the act of photographing a stranger turned in the public perception of it into a much more invasive practice. I am not saying this is right or wrong, it's just a thought. So, like that, photographing in public was given a veneer of intrusiveness that was just not there before. For this reason perhaps, street photography is not particularly respectable in academic/art circles, unless the photos come from a time when consent was not requisite or expected, let alone practiced.

.

 

[Pherdinand]

Oh, and anything in quotation marks

exactly 😀
quotes from the great ancestors, the biggest cliche of the 21st century

PS yes, a lot of cliches and a lot of utterly boring street shots... even aside the viewers' taste, there are plenty of general, universally boring shots
(incl many of my own)

Context matters (helps), a lot, and eye contact almost always helps (click here below, he he he)

 

[airfrogusmc]

Here's an interesting piece that you may or may not find to be that. But worth a watch for sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigxJAXKtWU&feature=youtu.be&list=PLem2p25RDaBlhzWG4IiUr92kkuxoGupr-

Also I have some words and images that were featured on the official Leica blog that get to some of this from my perspective anyway.
http://blog.leica-camera.com/2016/12/15/spontaneous-relationships/