Why glossy photography has nothing to do with street photography

My point of view is clear: street photography must be raw, direct, spontaneous.

City vision - Mexico City, 2022

I am still here after over 15 years. And he continues to do and write on street photography. I think I have the qualifications to be able to afford it.

Have you noticed how much street photography appears to be excessively glossy with excessive post production? And in this era of NFT artists the retouched and fake image imposes itself even more. But Street Photography can't be that. The heavy use of image editing with software makes street photography an allegory to what real street photography is.

Guys, always ask yourself: why do you take street photography? And why do you have to posterize an image? The effect can also have success with the public, for heaven's sake. But the moment you do it you are committing something that goes against the very core of the street photography experience.

Also consider that you have a certain lens and then do some strong make-up that destroys what a lens is able to offer in terms of performance. There are two fronts that appear clear and fairly defined within the Street Photography world: the raw photographers and the interveners. The first category respects the genuineness of the moment captured and believes that street photography should rely on the image itself, on what happens inside it, in its strength of content which, as we have seen in the previous post, does not necessarily have to tell a story but also simply a feeling, an emotional state, a particular energy.

The counterpart are photographers who think that their vision is not worthily represented by the simple moment captured and that the aesthetic care of the image with post-production retouching is a fundamental part of the process. The type of photography they propose finds a lot of consensus in photography competitions and, in general, is appreciated more by the general public, especially among those who do not have great photographic knowledge.

Obviously it is a question of points of view and I know that they are linked to this heavy edited approach to images. In general, I think that if an image makes you think about the editing used and attracts you for the more superficial aspect, or for how the aesthetics of the same is, this is to ignore the focus of street photography.

Of course everyone is free to make their choice. In general, the trend is in favor of highly retouched images, extremely refined from a formal and aesthetic point of view, chasing the fake. And therefore it always depends on the same question: who do you want to be as a photographer? Personally, I find those images really horrible and they annoy my sight.