A small guide to Street Photography PT. 6
My intent and main goal with this guide is to give to those starting with Street Photography a sort of handbook so you don’t need to join those basic workshops. After that reading if you want you can think to join an advanced street photography workshop, maybe with me.
Chapultepec, Mexico City (2013)
At this point, after having addressed the topic also giving ideas and reflections on sociology and psychology applied to photography, I think it is useful to go back and propose something more schematic to have clearer ideas.
STREET PHOTOGRAPHY, A DEFINITION
A definition
Un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings. In simpler words: People in candid situations in public places.
It’s a genre of photography that comes from reportage, specifically from straight photography that was a kind of documentary photography. We can affirm street photography is part of documentary photography, but different from photojournalism for motivations and aesthetics.
What is Straight Photography?
It was a photographic movement that reproduced in an objective reality without the aid of any technical implementation. It had its neuralgic center in the United States, in relation to the spread of documentary photography.
“Anything that can alter the picture automatically makes the shot less pure and therefore less true.” Among the most important photographers that may be associated to this movement:
Lewis Hine
Alfred Stieglitz
Paul Strand
Walker Evans
Helen Levitt
Dorothea Lange
When is born really Street Photography?
Our friend Nick Turpin found the earliest use of the term Street Photography in an article from the British Journal of Photography in 1878, but not used as today we do.
The crystallization of street photography
We begin to talk about street photography only in the 60s. In fact we can talk that his birth occurred in New York with freelance photographers in the front line such as Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand.
We can then speak of genre that was born in the '60s breaking away from reportage to become a branch of photography with particular aesthetics and motivations, and a new approach. In many cases, Street photography brings yet typical elements of pop culture of the '50s and '60s, where the Big Apple continues to be model city the ideal location for street aesthetics. Street photography is the snapshot of urban life seen on the street in his everyday life and in all its aspects: irony, tragedy, unpredictability, beauty and even cruelty.
The images of this photographic genre are the mirror of society, the people who compose it, captured during the life of every day somewhere keen eye for the nuances of the human comedy that is in progress in public spaces. Being a street photographer means being in tune with life, perceive the moods, smells, colors, live it with intensity and then trying to represent it only when it is absorbed.
Historical milestones that led to street photography
The “genetic” father of Street Photography is Henri Cartier Bresson.
Meanwhile Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Andre Kertesz, Helen Levitt were making Street Photography before the term was used.
Real father of Street Photography: Robert Frank with the book “The Americans”.
The Godfathers can be considered Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand.
John Szarkowski brought together the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus
In the same years away from any clamor Vivian Maier was taking photos on the streets using a Rolleiflex, this will only be discovered much later when its rolls are discovered.
1994 is the year of Bystander: A History of Street Photography," a collection of over 300 images compiled by photographer Joel Meyerowitz and writer Colin Westerbeck.
In 1995 Mignon from an idea of Giampaolo Romagnosi is the first Street Photography collective in Italy.
in public was set up in 2000 by Nick Turpin to provide a home for Street Photographers and soon establishes itself as the reference point on the internet to see what street photography is.
If street photography was a kind of music would be jazz. Or rock 'n' roll. Genres that have their improvisation.
Not all photos taken on the street can be considered street. Indeed we can speak of aesthetics for this street. It is not just a fact of decisive moment. Often the photographer in the street is focused to document the energy and representing a story taking a snapshot of the moment, a moment captured with instinct and the eye, the ability to see what the others are not able to see.
Despite we are used to associate the genre with black and white so much street photography today is in color. Joel Meyerowitz began shooting in color in 1962.
We can talk of 2 different languages: with black and white tend to focus on the essence of the shot and the story. In this sense the black and white is more simple and often can solve some problems.
The fact that many photographers made street photography without using the definition, that Vivian Maier passed all her life to photograph for herself and Mignon group when is born was not using the term street photography should clarify how Street Photography is essentially photography, a certain type of photography, which arises from a personal need rather than being a genre.
Street Photography usually doesn’t pay the bills, although it might at times, because is not a commercial type of photography.
We, the street photographers, we are animated by a desire to take pictures on the street that convert ourselves in different animals respect to other photographers. Street Photography can be used as theraphy, as a sort of meditation, an instrument to know the world and ourselves. Street Photography can be also a gym, a training to become better photographers. For all these motivations Street Photography is central to Street Photography, just like Joel Meyerowitz states.
Street Photography is not only one and it changes in relation to the photographer who does it: Tony Ray Jones, Joel Meyerowitz, Saul Leiter, Michael Wolf, Alex Webb, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Stephen Shore, Bruce Gilden, Vivian Maier, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander can be associated all to Street Photography and yet they completely different from each other, anyone with an identity and approach that are unique in many ways.
Street Photography continues to evolve and always will do. Because Street Photography follows the evolution of man and society, of which it is both its image and its reflection.
