I love street photography.
I am sick of street photography.
I need to qualify that remark, as much for me as for you.
Maybe it is too much avid self-saturation of the form, or trying too hard to find some relevance in it, but either way, I have started to “see through the makeup”. To see the artificial veneer of repetition for what it is.
First up, I am as guilty as anyone else of the thinks that are starting to annoy me and I recognise that I and everyone else, has the right to just ‘do” street photography however they wish (especially however they wish), but I am starting to want more, both from myself and from others.
Just like landscape, fashion, wedding and any other form of photographic endeavour, street shooting is heavily serviced with dozens (1000’s?) of talented shooters, who are all starting to blend together in content and intent. Everything, I suppose, settles for an accepted norm, some variations of that norm, then aberrations that create their own sub-genre or whither and die. The problem here is this blanket of normality provides a place where we can all hide as a like minded flock.
Street photography is an old form of photography. If you include candid photography of events and the realm of documentary journalism under it’s vast (vague) umbrella, it even goes back to the American Civil War with Brady and co. My first awareness of it, without even knowing what it was called, was the early 1980’s National Geographic style. It is basically a departure from documenting people in staged portrait images (as the technology forced), trying to get to the heart of an event and it’s consequences.
Cartier Bresson is often recognised as the father of modern street photography in the modern sense and his subject (usually Paris streets, but not always) helped to define the term “street” as a separate sub-genre of the more general documentary style, but I include Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Sam Abell, Fred Herzog, Saul Leiter, Sebastiao Salgado, Pentti Sammaallahti and many, many others into the broader scope. I view them all as attempting the same thing, candid, real life, human endeavour and human condition story telling. The roots of street photography are in documentary photography, the roots of documentary photography are in a need for understanding.
Why am I so frustrated?
The common thread of modern street imaging seems to be based on a disconnected (and disconnecting) , semi abstract, emotionless style using dark humour, cleverness and coincidence as a badge of honour. Humour has it’s place, but should it be the pinnacle of an art form? We are turning street photography into a type of short form parody like political cartooning.
This reliance on a form of loose abstractness, held together by commonality in thinking is possibly leading to a trivialisation of the core of street photography and a reliance on gimmicks and cliche.
Where is the connection? Where is the emotion?
The very first lesson any NG or similar shooter will tell you is something like “know your subject, connect and understand, be patient”. By this I do not mean intellectual knowledge (research), but a deeper, more respectful understanding of the subjects themselves. Salgado’s work for instance, came from working in the finance industry, learning the plight of the people he worked amongst, then using the camera to convey what he felt and why he felt it.