A Street Photography Saturday
Last Saturday I was in downtown to celebrate the birthday of my wife. We had a great time and I also took several photos.
Photos were realized with my Fujifilm XPro2 with the 7Artisans 25mm f1.8. I want to share with my readers the results. No anything is perfect, just like a photo walk is. I share photos that I started to make from my barrio arriving to the end with a shot made in the subway.
The shape, you put it, aware that it cannot be just one, even if many would like it. Here is the point: today the term street photography would like to homogenize, create a unique thought, beyond which you cannot and must not go. Here, then, explain the rules and visual codes that many accept as the gospel. The usual tips on blogs, the usual ideas, how to do street photography. Then maybe they even tell you that street photography talks about the photographer's experience on the street, but this is not applied when clichés and formulas created and exploited by others are repeated slavishly. And certainly a more simplified street photography is convenient for many, even if they should then explain the reason for the many differences and above all of the personalities of the various Klein, Moriyama, Leiter, Friedlander, Shore. Keep in mind that someone not happy with the term street photography went further into an excess of megalomania and stuck the word hardcore in front of us. Here, the use of labels, precisely those badly digested by Garry Winogrand, reveals a paucity of ideas and above all a tendency to conformism, which if on the one hand is innate in many people, reveals part of the problems fomented today by the web. It is well said, therefore, to say that the street is something strictly connected to the personality and experience of the photographer on the street, but today with the spread of groups on the internet, we are witnessing even more a continuous repetition / reproduction, devoid of identity, slavishly tracing things said and seen by others. Alex Coghe, 2018 - all rights reserved
I can see how my street photography is appreciated only by certain kind of people and not any street photographer. I analyzed that and I answered to myself that those street photographers focused on visual jokes, optical effects and aiming to the wow effect can hardly appreciate the old school street photography. The millennial effect on street photography created a wave of photographers that like the immediate appreciation, because the attention to a photo now never exceeds three seconds.
I don’t care. And I continue to make my own thing. That is a photography that you can see in years and has still a documentary value.
If I want to define myself to distinguish myself from this new breed of street photographers, I would say that I am a concerned street photographer. Also my most recent project, still ongoing, Pandemic Life goes in this sense.
I still have as references the work of the masters: Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier, Todd Papageorge, Giovanni Umicini just to name the first ones coming to my mind. They make it great through the gestures, the expressions, and their work is still valuable today as a document of their era. I am that kind of photographer: I want to give a portrait of the life in the years I am living. Street Photography to me is documentary photography and not just a business card of me as photographer.
