[Leica] Street Photography

[imra at iol.ie (Douglas Barry)]

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.
>
>   
>   
>