They reveal the city through his eyes. With the type having been so long established in other media, it followed that photographers would also pursue t… Evans, Lange, and Abbott, among many others, were making sense of contemporary circumstances, not only the economic struggle but also modernization and the growth of cities and industry. Well, yes, of course it is, but not for the purist who lives in the age of black and white analog photography. In order to understand the history of street photography, it is vital to know what street photography is. Once more, an issue that is still largely debated – is a color photograph a true street photo? Thanks to the technical improvements mentioned above, the post-war years were a golden age in the history of street photography, both in America and Europe. I think much of what we know and call street photography today is in for a serious moment of truth. Though he was influenced by many of those who influenced the street photographers of the 1950s and ’60s, he was not chiefly interested in capturing the spirit of the street. The very publicness of the setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge. Street photography is a tradition that dates back to the invention of photography. Today, all one needs to become a “street photographer” is a camera, even a mobile phone, and then a platform to “publish” – Facebook, Instagram, or even a website. Naomi Blumberg was Assistant Editor, Arts and Culture for Encyclopaedia Britannica. With advanced photographic technology, they took to the streets in cities, towns, and rural areas across the country to document the people and places that encapsulated the American experience. The very publicness of the setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Today, we just count Facebook likes and accept that as an expression of aesthetic value or artistic worth. Someone once claimed that a great photographer makes about a hundred good images in a lifetime, maybe a dozen truly great photographs. Omissions? Somehow monochrome images are supposed to be superior in conveying reality – despite the fact that we all see in color. The invention of photography in the early 20th century coincided with the urbanization and globalization of the world. Monet also painted the same subject repeatedly from the same perspective but at different times of day to see how the change in light would affect the subject, something a camera could do quite efficiently. Is that Bruce Gilden knockoff of someone’s grandmother on her grocery run, currently making the rounds on Facebook, actually of any artistic value? I have never been a fan of history (from bad memories of rote memorization in school). Stieglitz, for example, photographed the streets of New York City and Paris at the turn of the 20th century during inclement weather, the effects of which were captured in his images. Instead, he was driven to photograph every last remnant of the Paris he loved. Finally, Joel Meyerowitz ushered in the use of color film in street photography. The history of street photography The saying goes, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and street photography certainly lives up to this reputation. Seemingly no one edits his or her work anymore, at least in street photography. Interesting concept but hotly debated. A quote from Susan Sontag’s wonderful book, On Photography, will help us better understand. Since its inception in Victorian times, humankind has had a fascination with capturing not only the real, raw and gritty but also the mundane. Furthermore, all three contributed elements to the genre that still remain hot topics for debate. The answer is not a simple one. There is simply no way that millions and millions of banal photographs of strangers doing everyday things is ever going to be recognized as art – despite the number of likes I can garner from my friends and the village idiot. I always find this argument amusing. The difference is immense; simply take a look at William Eggleston’s work to immediately see what I mean. Therefore the first photographs ever taken were generally done in the streets… William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the calotype. These critics understood the history of photography and the philosophy of aesthetics and situated (or rejected) the work into that larger conversation. Impressionists such as Claude Monet introduced sketchy brushstrokes into their compositions to express movement and change over time. Mark Cohen was among the first to make “no finder” shots. One important element is knowing a bit of the history of street photography and then figuring out where your work fits into that bigger picture. I’m reminded of one well-known street photographer who’s images receive thousands of “likes”, despite the fact that every image she makes looks like an iPhone photo taken by a child – shots of the sides of people’s heads, people strolling down the sidewalk with umbrellas (somehow the umbrella has become more photographed than the Queen), and other trivial nonsense. Things weren’t so easy for Frank or Winogrand or even Gilden. Eugène Atget, another early street photographer, documented the streets of Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before they were demolished and rebuilt according to the new city plans implemented by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. It was during that period that street photography really began to take form as a unique subgenre of documentary photography. Street photography has become such a popular pastime that the genre now produces hundreds of thousands of dull, clichéd candid images of random strangers by so-called street photographers every single day. This is how so much of the banal, clichéd, over-worked street photography makes its way into our lives. This is a critical aspect of street photography success that is often overlooked or undervalued. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Street photographers do not necessarily have a social purpose in mind, but they prefer to isolate and capture moments which might otherwise go unnoticed. He took photographs for more than a half century and influenced generations of photographers to trust their eye and intuition in the moment. Let me explain. One important element is knowing a bit of the history of street photography and then figuring out where your work fits into that bigger picture. Next, their friends or “followers” come along and hit the like button. No, of course not. In fact, many early street photographers started out as photojournalists or fashion photographers and often continued to perform those roles for a living while they pursued their art during their off-hours. In contrast to Atget, photographer Charles Marville was hired by the city of Paris to create an encyclopaedic document of Haussmann’s urban planning project as it unfolded, thus old and new Paris. The impulse to visually document people in public began with 19th-century painters such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who worked side by side with photographers attempting to capture the essence of urban life. Many people run out and buy a camera and then hit the streets. While discussing his work, Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase “the decisive moment,” which resonates particularly well with the street photographer’s aim: taking advantage of that split second in which the elements of a photograph come together with clarity. History of Street Photography. This was arguably the moment that gave birth to much of what we would term street photography today – raw, gritty, candid moments of people doing everyday mundane things. Those accidents serve as some of the earliest examples of movement captured in the still image, an expression of the energy of the street. Truly a case of the blind leading the blind, and it’s beginning to show. The Leica allowed the photographer to interact with the surroundings and to capture moments as they happened. Especially when it comes to the history of street photography. Painters, sketchers, and photographers alike treated the street as their studio, recording the mundane and the spectacular, the quintessential figures and the bizarre. And round and round we go. At first the camera was seen as a tool that could replace the artist’s hand, but over time the camera’s unique capacities—its instantaneousness and ability to see more than the human eye (and with better focus)—clearly set a photograph apart from a painting and made photography not an adjunct study but rather a distinct medium valuable in and of itself. Voila! A comprehensively practical, educational & inspirational guide & insight into the world of Street Photography for both the Beginner & the improving Street Photographer, © Copyright Street Photography 2016 - All Right Reserved, Directions of Sensitivity in the Process of Taking Photographs. Later street photographers who would achieve fame were usually direct decedents of Frank. Academia - Is Street Photography Ethical. These same “street photographers” come home and sort through their 9000 frames (thank you digital photography) and pick out a couple they think are good.
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