To the Streets!

What is Street Photography?

Helen Levitt
New York, c.1940

Street photography is a genre of documentary photography that turns the lens on the everyday-ness of life, the typical people, places, events occurring.  Street photography seeks every emotion in the daily experience of living.  London Festival of Photography defines street photography as “un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings.” (http://www.lfph.org/what-is-street-photography)

Vivian Maier
www.vivianmaier.com

“In one sense it can be thought of as a branch of documentary photography, but unlike traditional documentary its chief aim — or at least its chief effect — is seldom to document a particular subject, but rather to create photographs which strongly demonstrate the photographer's vision of the world.” (http://facweb.cs. depaul.edu /sgrais/street _photography.htm)

The London Festival of Photography finds it easier to define street photography as a method, rather than a genre: “Subjects and settings can vary greatly but the key elements of spontaneity, careful observation and an open mind ready to capture whatever appears in the viewfinder are essential.”

Paul Strand
Wall Street, New York, 1915

Personally, I find that I can look at street photography all day and always be amazed at the beauty, sadness and surprise of the frequent, the typical, the common goings on in the everyday world.  It is this innocent, un-staged, true feeling of these photographs that, I believe, must draw interest to such a genre of photography.

History of Street Photography        

   

Toulouse Lautrec

In beginning to think about how and why street photography came about, I was reminded of a similar switch in painting subjects, from the formal to the candid, from the staged to the happenstance.  Looking at street photographs, I immediately recalled familiar paintings of spaces and people existing in spaces, such as works by Toulouse Lautrec and Renoir.  Both of these painters were producing work around the turn of the 20^th century, which is when Eugene Atget began photographing the streets of Paris.

Eugene Atget
Avenue de Gobelins, Paris, 1925

Eugene Atget (1857-1927) is considered one of the first street photographers.  Working as an architectural photographer in Paris, Atget captured about 10,000 images of Paris, its buildings and streets.  “Atget’s allegiance to outdated photographic technology, his focus on pre-French Revolutionary architecture  and ornamentation, and his utilitarian approach to photography marked him as emphatically old school.  A dedicated commercial photographer, Atget never considered the images he made to be art; they were, he insisted, simply ‘documents’- visual records that he peddled mostly to painters and libraries.” (http://www.nga.gov/feature/atget/)  Towards the end of his life, Atget did several series documenting urban lifestyles and street trades.  It is in this switch to documenting the typical lives in the city that one begins to see the very clear influence Atget’s photographs had upon later street photographers.

Eugene Atget
Parisienne Prostitute, c.1921

Street photography has perhaps always required certain spontaneity, a certain ease of movement as the photographer moves about the streets in search of a shot.  The development of the first small-bodied cameras (Kodak in 1880s and Leica in 1920s) allowed for photographers to be constantly on the move rather than the use of a stable, large format camera.   Additionally, the use of wet-plate technology required a premeditated and slow preparation process before taking photographs.  With the use of paper negatives, photographers were able to move about the streets with cameras loaded and ready for spontaneous photography.  (Bystander, 73)  Once cameras and techniques became portable and practical to carry around, photographers began photographing life as it was occurring around them.

4 Street Photographers

Henri Cartier-Bresson

1908-2004, French

Henri Cartier Bresson

Cartier-Bresson's photography combines the simplicity of the geometric forms with surrealistic images of human subjects.  His photographs are known for their human and gaiety.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 1954

Paul Strand

1890-1976, American

Paul Strand
Blind, 1916

Well-known for his early 1900s photographs of New York.  In his photographs, Strand had the ability to turn architecture into mere shapes and shadows, and people into intimate and sad subjects.

Helen Levitt
1913-2009, American

A New York City photographer, Levitt is known for her sensitive and sometimes comic photographs of  children in the city.  Levitt shot in both black-and-white and color film, rare for street photographers at that time.

Helen Levitt
New York, c.1980

Bernice Abbott

Bernice Abbott
Blossom Restaurant, 1935

1898-1901, American

Strongly influenced by Eugene Atget's photographs of the dilapidated architecture of Paris, Abbott chronicled New York city in images of its buildings and people at work.  Abbott wanted her work to illustrate the relationship and connections between the people of the city, and the physical, moving entity of New York City. 

There is something about looking at a discrete, four-sided image that forces us to see things differently than if we were to glimpse the same instant in real life.  Street photographers see the world in discrete images, capturing them for the rest of us, prompting us all to look differently at our environments, the people living around us, and our streets. 

Works Cited:

Westerbeck, Colin, and Joel Meyerowitz.Bystander: a history of street photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Print.

Scott, Clive. Street photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. London: I.B. Tauris ;, 2007. Print.

" The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) ." The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) . N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2013. <http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/112442##ixzz2Rd42Sb7iSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art>.

"Home - London Festival of Photography."Home - London Festival of Photography. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://www.lfph.org/what-is-street-photography

>.

"Atget: The Art of Documentary Photography." National Gallery of Art. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://www.nga.gov/feature/atget/>.t/