[Leica] Street Photography

[Sonny Carter]

Methinks thou doth protest too much.


SonC


On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 9:12 AM Mark Rabiner <mark at rabinergroup.com> wrote:

> 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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