What drives a photographer to go to the street, rather than holing up in a studio?

I consider the street photographer to be completely different from those who make still life, and in fact it is difficult to find a real street photographer who also loves taking pictures of a fruit composition or a set of watches.

I mean a real street photographer, working everyday on the streets. Because in the last years the genre experienced a boom in popularity and now it seems anyone wants to be a street photographer.

For anyone it is different and changes with the projects we are engaged at the moment, the experience we have in life and the positioning (focus) we are interested in giving to our photography.

But photography is essentially, at least for a documentary photographer:

A way to know the world

A way of being in the world

A way of representing an idea

By accepting this, we can understand how intent is fundamental when we do photography. This includes all the workflow starting from where we photograph, the topic / theme, how we photograph it and post-click decisions, before presenting them to an audience.

Photography is communication and it is essential to have clear ideas about what we want to communicate. When we decide to include certain elements, we are responsible for our choice. I believe that a photograph must be evaluated in its entirety (we can apply Gestalt psychology) and then analyzing the individual elements and what they offer on a communicative level (their documentary values).

When I have seen from the other side of the street I have seen a completely naked woman, improvising a show in front of the House of Representatives, but when I arrived there she was dressing again and I took several pictures. The one you see is the keeper in my opinion for the expression and gesture. The photo above is a photograph that few would dream of including in the context of street photography but for me it is. It is not even a comfortable photo for many, but my vision in general is not and that is why many have difficulty in relating to my work. I don't care about the pretty picture, I photograph what is interesting to me. Spontaneous moment of real life with a content. Still I see balloons superimposed on human heads: I am sorry but that is a kind of street photography which rips likes on instagram but which I define as absolutely boring and which documents nothing.

As a documentary photographer my goal is to give the viewer information about the place, and the elements present on the frame are essential to communicate and answer questions about: what, where, why, when. This is not always possible to have in a photograph and this is where captions help a photojournalist's work. Be careful, however, in street photography "captions" are not used and often the shots are not even titled, so as not to guide the viewer.

I was going to dinner with other street photographers in Los Angeles when I found this wonderful model outside the restaurant we were about to enter. Her expression attracted me so much that, perhaps also thanks to emotion and inexperience, I completely forgot to focus. In fact she is completely out of focus. Now the out of focus I do it on purpose. This was not the case, but understanding when a photograph still works despite the evidence of technical error is part of a formal knowledge of photography and, above all, of ourselves and how we want to present ourselves as photographers.

Stephen Shore said:

The images reflect the condition of oneself, paying attention

I think this is a great statement to quote because the images reflect the condition of ourselves, paying attention to photography which is not only represented by reality, but an absolutely personal act of showing what we see, and which perhaps others have not seen or they couldn't see.

There are different areas and directions of research, related to psychology, which focuses on art and aesthetics. In particular:

Experimental aesthetics (psychology of aesthetics)
Psychology of art
Neuroesthetics

Importantly, these fields are interdisciplinary and draw on knowledge in other related disciplines and branches of psychology.

Hollywood, Los Angeles, California (2011)

Developments in other areas of psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century contributed greatly to the understanding of the psychology of aesthetics. Gestalt psychology has produced influential ideas such as the concept of patterns and configurations that emphasize regularity, symmetry, simplicity and closure.

D.E. Berlyne in his "Aesthetics and Psychobiology", published in 1971, revolutionized the ideas on the understanding of the neural mechanisms of perception, cognition and emotion obtained in psychology. And studies entirely with modern imaging techniques led to neuroesthetics in the 1990s. According to recent studies we can say that the more fluently the perceiver can process an image, the more positive their aesthetic response is.

By understanding this as viewers we can understand (and improve) as photographers and be more aware when photographing.

About fifteen years ago, at least in Italy, the word reportage was often used with reference to street photography, and this was not bad at all because it forced, at least mentally, to search for photos with content and which were endowed with a documentary value. The drift of recent years, with fashion street photography, has imposed a very unbalanced type of photography in favor of aesthetics, putting aside the content a little. This has even generated opposing factions between photographers who live and see photography and its prerogatives in a diametrically opposite way. If it is undisputed that everyone can do what they want, I believe that there are rather simple, therefore trivial ways of doing street photography and which are responsible for a flattening towards aesthetic tricks, such as excessive underexposure, with a proliferation of photos with pitch black backgrounds, excessive use of shadows and closed blacks. Furthermore, we can see how many have specialized in street photography that features visual games and in superimpositions that create optical effects.

What would we do in a few years with all these useless photos with immediate effect on instagram? They are like a lot of music today: useless and quite forgettable. The search for immediate consent and, above all, the little study on photography, its history and its authors, results in a lot of junk that means nothing. I don’t think as some argue that reviewing certain photos of today in many years will have the same result as when we see the photos of Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt or André Kertész. Those photographers were able to translate their visual knowledge into images that show their documentation intent. If one points to the immediate result on instagram it is unlikely that he will have a correct approach as a street photographer.

Simona Guerra, a writer studious of the visual art related to photography, noted that this inclination of some photographers is boring in the long run.

There are two problems with this type of photo:

After an initial “wow” effect, the same photo or a set of photographs of that type get tired. In fact, if at first we can smile and even applaud, later we realize that the effect vanishes exactly as a joke told too many times does.

The second problem is of a content type and essentially refers to the usefulness of the photo. If it remains as an eye test to recognize a certain visual effect, in the end only that remains. The photo is all based on superimposition, and therefore tells about the photographer, but absolutely nothing remains as a social and anthropological reflection. The game completely eats up the image and there is not much else to see.

I have always argued that street photography must find an equilibrium between form and content.

For example we have to pay close attention to negative spaces in the image. They are not against negative spaces that used well can also strengthen the image and its impact. The content to which I refer most of the time is to offer at the same time information that reveals the human condition, for this reason I continue to refer to the classics Meyerowitz, Friedlander, Winogrand, Richard Sandler.

Today there are so many wrong models of street photography and I would say that certain visions in certain groups on the internet can be even lethal for our training path.

Better, much better to buy books and take refuge in the poetry of Willy Ronis and Mario Giacomelli, or perhaps by observing the lessons of many masters of Italian historical reportage, such as Gianni Berengo Gardin or Ferdinando Scianna.

In general, I would say that by content, in a street photograph, I mean those images that have some documentary relevance, in which humanity is presented even through small gestures and expressions. this passes through all those decisions that we make as visual authors and therefore the technical choices, of composition, those authorial choices that affect the form, the way of framing, but certainly to make it more evident in the story represented.

Let's think about how important the context in which our subjects "live" is in certain images, but also at a certain dimensionality offered by the compositional choices, from the point of view, by our position with respect to the subjects.

The visual game, at times, can be there but it cannot be just that.

In this I believe that someone like Richard Kalvar can be a reference. A photograph and its content: technique, form and content. By content we mean, at least I interpret it like this, as a set of relevance where I can clearly intuit the intention of the photographer on what he wanted to show in the interpretation, because the photograph, okay, we do it and for us, but in the end it is a perennial dialogue with those who will observe it.

From this we understand how a photograph has more or less value depending on how much the image has something relevant to communicate. There are, I must admit, some interesting implementations within an image that we can manage. I think of how many street images count with men with fedora or Borsalino-style hats, I think of silhouettes, I think of the visual contacts with the subjects, I think of a running child. All these examples to say that what we photograph, which can also be seen as a recourse to a cliché, can greatly help the content and strength of the image. From this point of view the subject, I am referring to the choice of the subject, we can understand it, becomes really important.

Watch this photo:

There is visual contact but it's not just that. what does it communicate to you besides that? Why did I decide to shoot?

I must admit that I was struck at first by the man and his appearance, one thing I notice a lot here in Mexico is that some people and situations seem to belong to the 40s or 50s. In this case the interest was also offered by a basic but interesting background, and above all the action of man who in fact also describes the work he does. all this has documentary relevance, but at the same time it offers that involvement of visual contact, I am in the reflection and therefore also becomes the documentation of a silent dialogue between me and the subject, something that I often cherish in my photography.

I think it is important to do what I often suggest to those who take the workshops with me: try to write over the photograph you took. give a first objective description, noting what is present in the image, analyzing all the objects present. the next will be that of the "metaphysical" reading and also detecting if there are particles of "lateral vision" present in the image. if there is a figure of speech, if the image reminds you of something, even a photo of a teacher who has struck you. This is all a task to do to learn how to read a photograph and at the same time read ourselves and what we are looking for, what we want to say through a photograph.

Single shots are welcome, but over time you will feel the need to tie everything together by a common thread that is your vision. It is not a one-day process, but the goal is that your work can be detached, so that people can say they recognize you just by seeing the photo. And this regardless of whether it is then proposed as a single shot or as a single body of work. Here I think this is the most ambitious goal for any photographer. Knowing and being able to tackle a design job or a single shot with your trademark that is offered by your way of experiencing the road and photographing it.

The motivations change from photographer to photographer. It mostly depends on what street photography is for. I used it as a school and now it is a gym, a way of keeping myself in training as well as the fact that my motivation is also internal: taking pictures on the street allows me to know more about the world around me, but also myself .

Every day the discovery is renewed, and I grow, as a photographer and as a person.

A small guide to Street Photography PT. 5

Those tattoos and my attitude

A small guide to Street Photography PT.4