Composition is nothing if you don’t provide the essence of the street

On the internet there is an infinite proposal of information about composition: all blog posts proposingvisual rules, geometrical concepts, and images analyzed with lines and shapes drawn over them to explain the point. To the end of the game the readers will find a lot as an end in itself composition analysis. Will it serve you on balance when you find yourself taking pictures on the street?

Please note: it is absolutely not my intention to lose everything that is the basis of so much photography taught. I too have done and sometimes do certain analyzes, but I believe that photography is much more than that and wanting to reduce everything to a geometric and mathematical discourse only serves up to a certain point. And on some level. Certainly it greatly facilitates those who are required to teach. But what about who has to learn?

Look at this photograph that I made yesterday:

Eje - Mexico City, 2021

There are three looks in this photograph. Starting from the left, the man allows us to look at the background with people walking in the distance. The second look is eye contact, with me, with you, with anyone looking at the image. The third and last one is a look perhaps distracted by thoughts of the woman in the middle.

Photography counts with an inclined plane. Of those that no one now proposes, completely addicted to a formal precision and rigidity that has never been typical of street photography. In the genuineness of the captured moment there is much of the approach of a photographer who never stops walking and takes pictures. Of that dynamism that you can read between the lines. Of that dimension of photography that reveals the photographer himself and his action of photographing.

I use in this post an image that can fix what I want to share with my readers. A spontaneous, instinctive and dynamic shot. Not something extremely thoughtful but for this very reason it also makes something that you can only feel present inside the shot.

There are photographers who would never propose shots with falling lines and crooked horizons. And maybe that's the point. Street Photography nourishes itself of the essence of the street. If a photographer is not able to to convey this within an image has a serious problem as street photographer.