GUide to street photography
Guide to street photography: what is street photography?
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
In my teens I was greatly impressed by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who gave us the concept of a ‘moment in time’, an instant in which the pictorial and compositional elements of an image fell into place. The chance clustering of figures in a square seen from above, the shadow of a girl falling across a stair as she leaps from step to step. Cartier-Bresson was one of a generation of street photographers set free by the portability and speed of the Leica 35mm camera and relatively fast black and white emulsions. As always in photography it’s a case of technology enabling the pursuit of art.
The other major source of vision in street photography is the physical juxtaposition of objects or people in ways that make us see beyond the familiar. Perhaps the greatest exponent of this has been Elliott Erwitt, whose keen eye picks out small details for us, the small dog next to its owners legs, an advertisement seeming to comment on the passers-by.
Not all street photography is spontaneous, but some are renowned for making it appear so. Robert Doisneau’s famous image of a kiss on a Parisian street was in fact created after the photographer approached two strangers and asked them to pose for him. Robert Frank has taken this genre of ‘Street Portraiture’ further, and there is much to be said for interacting directly in the image to photograph someone where a candid image may seem exploitative or voyeuristic.
Pompidou Centre, Paris, Olympus E410, 35-100mm f2 1/500 f2.8 ISO400
The Tenderloin, San Francisco. Olympus E410, Leica 25mm f1.4, 1/60 f4 ISO200.
The street is the public place where people come to shop, chat, wander around or be seen. It is the outward face of any country we visit, a source of difference and fascination, or familiar like an old glove. Any photographer who wishes to take original images on the street must deal both with its familiarity and its difference.
Unlike the photographer of personal spaces where simply ‘being there’ is half way to the image (see for example the work of Nan Goldin or Diane Arbus), the street photographer needs to seek a personal vision in the everyday that others would pass by.
