[Leica] Street Photography

Tue Sep 24 07:12:38 PDT 2019

Obviously if you were walking down the street taking pictures of the street life in an urban area (city) you might informally call what you're doing street photography. The phase has certainly been used more than once as it's just the obvious thing to come out of ones mouth.
But what the people who are getting much mileage, click bate, dollars out of the term now are doing are making it all encompassing mystical. "anything you want it to be in your imagination" in other words refusing to define it. At first they just thought of ways it was not photojournalism. "No deadline". 
It seemed to be anything which was not your kids opening their birthday presents.  It was anything other than posed pictures of smiling people.
I picked up a magazine and there was a fish which had washed up under a dock and they were calling it street photo of the month. It's click bate you will get more hits if you use the term "Street photography" in your thing. If you look in the table of contents or glossary of the various classic histories of photography it's marked by its non-presence. It's not there the reason being it was never a thing. I went to Strand and looked. Not in any books.
A minor turn of phrase. Certainly not a job description. I have less problem with it used as an informal photo genre for people who for some reason prefer to be not in any way involved with the obvious photojournalism and fine art reason to be taking pictures on urban streets. And it’s the same people who are just going through cameras trying to come up with a reason for that.
Though there is a long vaulted history of photography used to capture the human condition and these people never called themselves street photographers. They called themselves as I said before photojournalists or art photographers.  Or just Photographers as the human condition has always been the default serious photography.
As of late when you look it up they just started saying it's another word for "candid photography". Quite a step down from the "anything in your imagination" BS they were pulling before. They were starting to look bad and they knew it. Some people are just now starting to call themselves "Street Photographers". But on wiki they are backing off referring to people as such. They are starting to say a person is "doing street-style photography".  To me sounding way less ridiculous. So the jig is up.

-- 

Mark William Rabiner
Photographer

On 9/24/19, 9:26 AM, "LUG on behalf of Philippe via LUG" <lug-bounces+mark=rabinergroup.com at leica-users.org on behalf of lug at leica-users.org> wrote:

    Doisneau : « photographe indépendant » (from his oficial site).
    HCB? « photographe » , period (from the site of his foundation)

    Blah-blah you’re right.

    Amities

    Philippe

    > Le 24 sept. 2019 à 15:02, Douglas Barry <imra at iol.ie> a écrit :
    > 
    > What a lot of guff is swilling around about this term. Pulling a book down from my shelf, I see "What distinguishes Doisneau's street photography of the 1940s and 1950s is a capacity for narrative" blah, blah. This comes from the 1997 Phaidon "The Photo Book". So that puts it at least 22 years old. I rather suspect the term may be a lot older, but who cares. English is an embracing and mutable tongue, and who can count the number of photography terms and movements out there?
    > 
    > Douglas
    > 
    > 
    > On 24/09/2019 06:33, Mark Rabiner wrote:
    >> My two cents if the "Street Photography" term using phenomenon just admitted what it was instead of insinuating that it's been this ongoing longtime thing that everyone has always known about it but you were not paying attention it would not be so bad. I have nothing much against sometimes using a buzz word of the moment or click bait or weasel words which pretend to mean something but which are just messing with you.
    >> But the "Street" thing doesn't own up to it. I think many of them just want to feel a connect with the college kids who are just flipping off knowing anything about the art world or journalism and just want to walk around taking pictures and somehow be meaningful... rebellious.
    >> 
    >> But I think there are two main categories in photography which overlap a lot:
    >> Job titles and genres.
    >> The Job titles describe you and the genres describe your photographs.
    >> If you are showing somebody a landscape it's a Landscape. That’s the Genre your image is part of.
    >>  If it’s a big part of what you always do you can say you are a Landscape photographer and have it on your business card.. And when people see your images they might believe you.
    >> The Yellow Pages had two categories for photography. Doctors only got one and Lawyers only got one.
    >> Commercial and Portrait.
    >> If you were a landscape photographer I think that fit into neither Commercial nor Portrait..
    >> Landscape it think is a sub category of Art Photography. The Gallery market. Art Collectors.
    >> And you could not even look those up Art Photography in the Yellow Pages.
    >> 
    >>    
    > 
    > 
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