How many times have we read this on various blogs, on visitor-grabbing decalogues and even repeated in many workshops? It is time to question this widespread belief.

Yes, we read this over and over. A street photo must tell a story. This is a universally shared idea, to the point that it has now become a sentence thrown there, without even thinking anymore.

It starts from the idea connected to reportage photography in which even in a single photo something must happen, but let's think about it for a moment. Above all we think back to many street photographs that we recognize as very important street photographs, I think for example of Lee Friedlander and his photo of the woman from behind and the shadow of the photographer on her coat. Or that of Joel Meyerowitz on a street corner where there are only people walking.

Many street photographs, even those recognized as some of the best ever taken, are not necessarily photographs with relevant stories within them. On the contrary. Most of the time we can't even talk about a story.

Street photos don’t have to tell stories.

With this blog I also intend to start rejecting many cliches and ideas related to Street Photography that so many have repeated in various blogs over the years, especially as an infinite copy and paste that has spread from blog to blog, from lesson to lesson. from conference to conference.

As a street photographer, I don't have to tell a story. I am not a photojournalist, at least at that time, and I am not called to respond to the 5 W of journalism. A photo in the street is often a reaction to a stimulus, a moment that gives me an intuition from what we have in front of us and sometimes even unconsciously makes me lift the camera, instinctively and ... snap!

In that way we can understand how a good street photo can be just the instinctive recording of a moment that does not necessarily tell a story but rather an emotion, a particular energy, a form of showing to the observer, as if to give the sensation of being there. In the moment in which the concept of decisive moment is accepted as outdated and also overestimated we can understand how street photography can be nurtured and motivated by something else.

This is an open invitation to use your brain, guys. Let’s stop to talk with ideas from the others. I can only suggest that. I am not pretending you agree with me on that or any other blog post published here.

Good street photographs should arouse the viewer’s interest and that can be for many reasons: tension (that particular feeling recognized and visible in a shot that I prefer to call energy), a particular combination of colors, expressions and gestures, a particular character, a ceratin dynamism, the flow of the city, a particular insight about the city, the culture or just about a street or a small portion of the place, the light and the dimensions generated, the reflections, a ripped billboard that becomes unusual or surreal…the possibilities are many and not necessarily linked to a story.

Let this be told by a photographer who has not experienced any real crisis of creativity for years. If you begin to see the world around you as a continuous stream of fragments, then you will understand that we street photographers do not have to wait for stories, but rather it is important how connected we are with the place where we are and how sensitive we are to catching even seemingly irrelevant details. which, however, can be photography.

Let's dispel a myth: a street photo doesn't have to tell a story

It is the same photo repeated over and over again

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