What is street photography?
©2015 Serge van Neck
Few things are more ambiguous or hotly contested than the definition of street photography. Do all pictures have to be taken on a street? Do they have to have people in them? Do they have to be candid? Should you ask people's permission to take their picture before you take it, after you take it, or not at all? Should you shoot stealthily from a distance or get right in people's faces? Believe it or not, there are great photographers who have argued on either side of these points. Others bristle at rules of any kind. Garry Winogrand actually hated the term street photography because it doesn’t reveal anything about the photographer or their work.
Street photography in urban and rural areas
When I first got into photography I lived in the Phoenix, Arizona area. Except for trips to the mountains, there wasn't much in the way of impressive landscapes I could find, and my "nature" shots were mostly found at the botanical garden and the zoo. But the streets were there, and the mild weather made night photography a joy. I would take the light rail to downtown Tempe or Phoenix and set up my tripod on a corner somewhere and just start shooting, playing around with long exposures and different apertures, until I understood how various settings affected motion blur, the deep glow of neon signs, and the diffraction and starbursts coming from street lights. I was not "stealth"—I was very visible with my tripod, bulky DLSR camera and heavy backpack. People were unavoidable (not that I was trying), but I did not engage them. What I found, however, was that my presence occasioned some passersby to engage me in conversation by asking me questions: What are you doing? Are you a student, a reporter? When I told them I was just taking pictures for the fun of it, they would either move along, stick around to chat for a while, or in a few cases, ask me to take their picture. In the process of doing this, I discovered that while I'm a bit shy about approaching strangers in the street, I have no trouble having conversations with people who approach me.
While getting this experience and practice, I was not aware that I was in fact doing street photography. To me it was just photography, and the streets at night were merely an interesting subject that allowed me to learn more about my camera and photographic techniques. I wasn't even aware that there was an actual genre dedicated to what I was doing. Had I known, I'm sure I would have started learning about it and taken better advantage of the opportunities I had while living in an urban environment. Ironically, I did not get the memo until soon after I had moved to rural South Dakota.
Shortly after moving here, I was looking forward to every opportunity to visit a "real" city to do some photography. At the same time that I was identifying more and more as a street photographer—albeit more as an ambition than as a reality—I felt cruelly removed from any place I could practice and hone my newfound craft. But then I remembered that one of my favorite places to photograph was the small rural town of Bisbee, Arizona, and I began to realize that even in my own tiny three-stoplight town there are many hidden gems that make for interesting street photography. I took further encouragement from photographer Eric Kim:
“As photographers, we always want to photograph novel things–things that are extraordinary. We get accustomed to the things in our own neighborhood, our own cities, and our own daily lives. We always think that the ‘grass is greener on the other side’ and that photographing in the streets of Paris will be more interesting than the suburb that we may live in. I know a lot of street photographers who live in suburbs, and don’t have the opportunity or access to photograph in a big and bustling city like Chicago or New York. They feel that because of this, they cannot take interesting photographs. . . . So don’t take your own hometown for granted—even if you live in a suburb. Rather than thinking what you hate about your city, think about what you find interesting about it. Photograph the boring things of your city—and never quit exploring. If you are able to make a boring photograph interesting, you have done your job as a photographer.”
The landscapes here are stunning. That was one of my biggest surprises about this state, in which I had never set foot until two months before I moved. On and around the Rosebud Indian reservation, the hills, vegetation, snow, horses and bison offer many great opportunities for landscape photography right in my back yard—opportunities I take full advantage of. But I found myself strangely drawn to the crumbling sheds, barns and farmhouses that dot the landscape. The small town I live in, which can barely be said to have a main drag, is also home to a number of abandoned, dilapidated or just plain ugly buildings, which I immediately started photographing. For better or worse, my eye seems to find beauty in the mundane and the ugly, and I want to capture the essence of it. I discovered later that this is one of the motivations that drives many a street photographer.
“Bill at one time said to his great, highly respected friend: ‘well, what am I going to photograph? Everything here is so ugly.’ And our friend said, ‘Photograph the ugly stuff.’ Well we were surrounded everywhere by this plethora of shopping centers and ugly stuff. And that is really initially what he started photographing.” — Rosa Eggleston, wife of famed photographer William Eggleston
How studying the masters has validated my own work
Once having decided that I want to focus more on street photography and reading blogs and watching videos by current photographers who specialize in the genre, I started to become a little discouraged. I was told that I had to have people in every picture, that I either had to walk for miles to get the right shot or stay in one place for hours waiting for the "decisive moment", that I had to use a particular focal length, that all my street photography would need to be shot in a similar way if I wanted to build a recognizable style, that I had to pick between black & white or color, and countless other things any good street photographer should be doing. Going back over my existing street photos I counted very few people, and among those, most were just passersby with no specific facial expression or other interesting "human" feature. Instead I had a lot of buildings, signs, murals, back alleys, vehicles, and the like, but not much that looked like what these people were telling me defines street photography. I started to doubt the validity of what I was doing.
Then in my studies, I came across William Eggleston, one of the foremost pioneers of color street photography and a lover of capturing the mundane and ugly. In his photography I recognized myself, not as I am now, but as I aspire to be. His photos of cars, gas stations, snack bars, living rooms and miscellaneous objects reassured me that street photography does not need people in the frame to be considered as such. When he does feature people, they don't seem to conform to any kind of rule about being candid or facing the camera. On first blush, his photos seem to lack meaning or purpose, but when you look deeper, you notice that the way he captured these mundane scenes is very powerful, and not just because of his exquisite use of color. And perhaps the reason that he is misunderstood by many is that they are looking for meaning that isn't necessarily there.
“What I’m photographing, it is a hard question to answer. And the best I’ve come up up is ‘life today.’ I don’t know whether they believe me or not, or what that means. [Pointing at a photograph] I don’t know what to say about that, but it is today.” — William Eggleston
“There is no particular reason to search for meaning.” — William Eggleston
In the words of photographer Martin Parr, “[Eggleston] takes very ordinary situations and can create very powerful pictures out of almost nothing. And therefore he is not relying particularly on the ultimate decorative thing like a nice sunset—or the incredible nostalgia that you will often see in contemporary practice. I would say he is kind of beyond that if you would like, he is almost photographing on the gap of everything else.”
I highy encourage you to learn more about William Eggleston, beginning with this excellent video introduction.
Post-processing vs. straight out of camera
Another little doubt that was creeping into me was whether post-processing my pictures made them somehow not real "street". From the very beginning I've never bothered saving JPEG images on my camera because I would always import the RAW files into Adobe Lightroom, make my edits, and then export to JPEG from there. With my Nikon DSLR camera there was no other way—images taken straight out of the camera look washed out and, well, blah. They're meant to be manipulated in some way. When I purchased my Fuji mirrorless camera, however, the wide variety of built-in film simulations and other settings made it possible to create very good images straight out of the camera. Listening to various street photographers on their videos and blogs—many of whom shoot Fuji—I started to become convinced that the "purest" form of street photography meant shooting as though I had a vintage film camera loaded with a specific type of film, and that the images coming straight out of the camera should not be edited in any way. After experimenting with many film simulation recipes I was able to create very satisfactory pictures, but even with the best possible settings, I still was not always satisfied with the final result. While some JPEG pictures turned out even better than I’d hoped, others were just not how I "saw" the scene before I took it.
Studying the masters has clarified this concept in my mind. Certainly a photographer should strive to create the best composition from the start—not "shoot to crop", where you just take a shot and figure you'll crop it in Lightroom later. This is something I've been very guilty of in the past, and I agree wholeheartedly that it's not only lazy but also reflects poorly on the final result (that doesn't mean that it's never okay to crop, sometimes it's a necessary evil). However, even the most purist of film photographers throughout history have made decisions that changed the final look of the picture, whether it was in their choice of film or in the way they developed and printed it. I became reassured in the knowledge that post-processing is not cheating; it is an integral process of making a photo.
“You don't take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
That having been said, I often deliberately set out to only shoot straight-out-of-camera JPEG, because there is an enormous sense of freedom in just being able to upload the pictures straight out of the camera and be done with them. It also makes for a more focused shooting experience, just like with film. And yes, I’ve even begun to dabble in 35mm film photography using a couple of sweet vintage cameras I bought on eBay. But more on that in another post.
Street Urban and Rural Life Photography
I believe that art should tend towards inclusion, not exclusion. Perhaps it's because it validates my own style, which I've developed mostly unconsciously until recently, but after having studied various photographers it's clear to me that the term street has less to do with a specific location or setting than it does with a particular approach to the act of photography.
“One aspect of the genre that appeals to me is that it’s non-exclusive. Because the subject matter does not require special access, it really is a democratic enterprise. It doesn’t even require a street. Any place that is inhabited by man is usually accepted within the genre.” — Dan Winters
So what makes a photo a “street” photo? I admit I don’t rightfully know. I used to have two separate categories on my website; one for street photography and another for what I called “urban and rural life”. The idea was that images that had people in them or were “edgy” would be street photography, while the rest—bridges, roads, shops, signs or whatever, regardless of environment—would go into the other bucket. But the more pictures I took, the less sense that distinction made because they all reflect human life in one form or another. So I got rid of the street photography gallery and merged everything into urban & rural life.
When people come up to me in the street asking me why I’m taking pictures, I still tell them that I’m a street photographer, because that’s the term most familiar to people. But if they ask me what that means, I answer: “I document human life wherever I encounter it.”
