Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Actually that opens up all kinds of questions but I guess most of them can be >summed up in this: What is it, exactly, that "street photographers" are >trying to SAY about the people they photograph? In other words, what is the >point? > >Bob (trying to become street smart) McEowen bob, maybe the point is documentation. to capture on film the way life is being lived by the inhabitants of a given place at a given time, all going about their business as they normally do, unaware for the most part that they are being recorded on film. while it's not my favorite type of photography, i find this kind of work fascinating for its documentary appeal. it's a form of visual anthropology, if you like. think of what we can learn from the work of weegee, winograd, singh, and others - they give us a glimpse into a world which we might otherwise not know. think of how many iconic images are essentially street photographs (eisenstadt's 'sailor kissing a girl,' for example), or how many of the 'greats' worked in this way: brassai, doisneau, hcb, rodchenko, etc. in a way, even atget practiced a kind of street photography, not only in the literal sense, but in the sense that he captured for posterity his world at a given point in its development, a world that has since disappeared and that we would not know had he not recorded it, and others worked to promote and preserve his work. to come back to your question about what the street photographer is saying about the people in his photographs, maybe it's this: these people lived. this is how they looked. this is what they did. it may not sound very profound, but could anything else be moreso? guy