Street photography

Street photography generally refers to photographs made in public places — not only streets, but parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and myriad other settings — often but not always featuring people going about their everyday lives. In one sense it can be thought of as a branch of documentary photography but unlike traditional documentary its chief aim — or at least its chief effect — is seldom to document a particular subject, but rather to create photographs which strongly demonstrate the photographer's vision of the world. Good street photography often ends up being good documentary photography without really trying, especially after the passage of a few years, but unlike documentary it seldom has an explicit social agenda or rhetorical intent. It tends to be more ironic and distanced from its subject matter.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Street photography is often closely-align with "New Topography" landscape photography — key distinctions are the sense of immediate human presence and smaller scale in typical Street Photography.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Like photojournalism, street photography often concentrates on a single human moment, caught at a decisive (or deliberately indecisive) moment. However, unlike photojournalism, the moment depicted usually has no significance in and of itself except to the interested parties and the photographer. A stolen kiss on a street corner; a man jumping a puddle; a woman lost in her thoughts in a diner; a shopping trolley glowing in the last rays of sun: these are the bread and butter of street photography but unlikely to cut much ice with a photojournalist's picture editor.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Street photography is often thought of as having reached a zenith between roughly 1940 and 1970 when many of the seminal works were created, coinciding (although it was hardly a coincidence) with the introduction of the lightweight, high-quality 35mm rangefinder camera, and exemplified in particular by the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. But in truth street photography has a much longer pedigree than that and it has continued to evolve in the decades since.

Related Topics:
Zenith - Rangefinder camera - Henri Cartier-Bresson - Robert Frank - Garry Winogrand

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Street photography, like most other branches of photography, has been driven by both aesthetic and technological innovations, and often the introduction of new technology has had a profound impact on the prevailing aesthetic. The introduction of small, fast, high-quality digital cameras in recent years has already begun to affect the aesthetic paradigm and seems to have been responsible for an explosion of image-making in the genre.

Related Topics:
Photography - Digital camera

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Street photography has never been a particularly commercial branch of photography and yet it holds an abiding fascination for photographers and audiences alike, not least because the visual drama of 'the street', however defined, provides a subject which is capable of being continually revisited and reinterpreted. In this respect at least, street photography is one of the more reflexive of photographic disciplines: unlike documentary photography or photojournalism, with which it shares many features, street photography is often not primarily concerned with its subject, but with the way the subject is represented. The street photographs which anchor themselves in the mind of the viewer are generally distinctive not so much for what is seen, but the way it is seen: the quotidian rendered extraordinary.

Related Topics:
Photography - Documentary photography - Photojournalism

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Like jazz, street photography has a relatively small base of canonical subjects (for example, crowds, the urban landscape) which are endlessly reworked and re-seen. For this reason, the most interesting works in the genre are arguably as much about photography as they are about anything else. Perhaps this is another reason why the genre seems such a rewarding one for its practitioners.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~