Black and White to dissociate myself from the current Street Photography

What is the most effective method today to dissociate yourself from current street photography?

By now, following me and following this blog, you should have understood: I don't like the street photography that is promoted in the mainstream circuits. The one, to be clear, that wins at various awards and festivals around the globe.

I just can't identify with or even like that way of understanding and doing street photography.

Photography as an end in itself, made to show the ego of the photographers who do it, through their eye, always looking for applause for having found a juxtaposition, a visual game. That photography has no landing place of social observation but, on the contrary, is a continuous and frantic masturbatory act done in public.

Stuff that gets applause only among those who do it. In practice it is photography in constant search of consensus from the "club of street photographers" who have become in some cases a sort of lobby. But in fact their dynamics move like those of a lobby.

I am, for this reason, a street photographer who doesn't like what is meant today by street photography.

Today we can talk about a street photography that is something very different from what I studied and loved. And that I am concerned with continuing to do. This is why I sometimes talk about old school and sometimes about documentary street photography. To mark a differentiation that for me is fundamental, having arrived at this point.

Clearly what is done today also has its own aesthetic connotation: I note that that street photography, which I consider useless and also quite vulgar, is done in color. And all these street photographers today shoot in color. For me it is not a coincidence.

And also from this observation, in the course of my personal reflections on the type of photography I was doing, reflections that led me to a very precise imprint, a different connotation that today embraces a bit of all my visual research, I decided that black and white represented the way to dissociate myself from the "great circus of contemporary street photography".

I believe that simply proposing my photo in black and white already highlights this detachment that allows me to completely distance myself from what is currently associated with the idea that these circus performers have created of street photography.

Black and white suddenly sweeps away even the slightest association with the new street photography, with all that army of wannabes, of magazines pushed by people who are not street photographers but play at being one for mere economic gain, of trends imposed from above, of camera manufacturers and their pathetic marketing strategies, of those who make collages and make people believe that that photo is not a composite, of those who think that a visual game and photography as a rebus has some social value.

Black and white puts you in a position to enter into the soul of things and offer a reflection on reality. Because black and white has always been, in the history of photography, the aesthetic form of social reportage, that of those who have made the history of photography, to reach the soul of people, to enter into a certain theme, to offer deep attention to emotions, relationships, human gestures, suffering and resistance against the system and against the very idea of ​​death.

Far from the vulgar and sloppy of these times. Far from the photography pushed by Instagram that, even in the algorithm, pushes for color photography rather than monochrome.

Black and white as a tool to battle everything that leaves me intolerant today in the world of street photography.

Proudly dissociated.