To be honest, I don’t think it’s so important to classify and quantify what is or isn’t Street Photography with a capital S and a capital P. All that really matters is that you’re out there photographing—exploring the world through your camera’s lens and through your own inner perception. In the past, I’ve spent too much effort making sure my photos are ‘street’ enough. Do I really care if someone else can ‘smell the street’? So, over time, I gave up on trying to fit into a particular mold and focused purely on shooting that which interests me. After some years of this, I don’t think of myself so much as a ‘street photographer’ but more broadly as an urban photographer. This is much easier to define: I photograph in the city and my subject is predominantly the city, in its various aspects.
But, unfortunately, my mind can’t let it go. I give into the human compulsion of classifying and categorizing things. The taxonomy of photographs is no exception. I can’t help but put my photos into neat little mental boxes, one box for each type. It baffles me why I bother thinking about this topic, but nonetheless it can be fun. And perhaps there is some value to cordoning off one type of photography from another, not for any misguided idea of actually labeling photos (as that has no real importance) but for the purpose of better understanding what I am striving for, better defining my creative goals. Identifying what puts the ‘street’ into a street photograph should, in theory, help me understand how to create photographs that have these desirable qualities.
And so, I pondered, and this is what I came up with: street photographs have 5 elements that make them such (and also, reasons why they are not always 100% necessary).
A candid photo of an un-posed subject in a public place.
Candidness
First and foremost, street photography should be candid. This also means that the photograph is not staged in any way. If you pose your friend or even a person on the street, then they know they are being photographed. And so, the scene is no longer candid. But here’s the rub, there is a lot of work out there (my own included) in which the subject has become aware of being photographed, but more or less ignores the photographer. Is this candid enough? What is the threshold for candidness? Does Bruce Gilden’s or Tatsuo Suzuki’s work still count as candid? Would anyone tell those guys they are not street photographers? Nonetheless, we can confidently say that having your friend pose in a way that is seemingly not staged would be ‘cheating.’
On the other hand, is it cheating if no one finds out? That is a question that we as photographers have to answer for ourselves. For me: I think of myself as a kind of journalist, albeit documenting regular life instead of newsworthy items. So, for me, posing and staging is not cool. In fact, even the Gilden/Suzuki style is not for me. I try to be more like a transparent eyeball, seeing and a capturing, but not influencing. In the end, it seems a photograph can be placed on a spectrum of candidness.
A most mundane scene.
Mundanity
A street photograph should not have subjects that are ‘newsworthy’ in any sense. Though we take a journalistic approach in street photography, we are not exactly practicing journalism. The goal is not to seek out the extraordinary and photograph that. Instead, we are sensitive to the mundane, the everyday, the run-of-the-mill. We notice the brief flashes of brilliance that the universe gifts to rare moments, but the underlying subjects are everywhere to be found: people, objects, shadows on a wall, lines in the street, all of the regular clutter of normal life. It’s the street photographer’s task to notice them when they are momentarily elevated. And that is when we click our shutter.
The thing is, the overlap between street photography and journalism is unavoidable because the distinction is so razor thin. Once again, there is a spectrum. The work of purely ‘visualist’ street photographers such as Siegfried Hansen or Matt Stuart could be said to photograph only the mundane. But some photographers, such as Alex Webb or Bruce Davidson, take on a more documentarian subject matter.
A rare passing moment, not likely to ever repeat again.
Transience
Henri Cartier-Bresson called it the ‘decisive moment,’ that is, a moment or instance that is ephemeral, transient, never to be repeated again in this universe. If a photograph adheres to the first element, candidness, then seemingly all street photographs must also have the element of transience. Since we cannot stage a moment, it is unlikely to happen again. Then again, not every moment is so perfectly unique that a similar moment cannot occur again in the same place. In my years exploring the city I’ve certainly revisited certain ‘good’ spots again and again. And in those repeat visits I’ve seen, even photographed, moments that are not too dissimilar from one another. But perhaps, this fact suggests that the photos are rather on the weak side—not transient enough to be true street photographs. These days I do feel an extra sense of satisfaction with a photo if I know the moment is not likely to ever naturally repeat. But once again, it seems a photograph can be placed on a spectrum of transience.
Juxtaposition of color and form.
Context
What’s the difference between a street photo and a street portrait? Context. Street photography is rarely purely about the subject… except, you know, when it is. I’ll cut right to the chase: it’s a spectrum again. A photograph is more ‘street’ if it ties elements together. Photos that focus purely on a single subject, without showing their environment and how they are connected with each other, are portraits (or still life pictures if they focus on inanimate objects). Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. What does ‘context’ mean anyway? It could be the colors surrounding the subject, or a juxtaposition of forms and shapes, or a visual pun, a joke, a gag. A street photo ties connections between its various elements in a web, where individual elements synergize to create something that is more than a sum of its parts.
A shadowy world.
A scene both abstract and surreal.
The Fifth Element... Otherworldliness
The final piece of the puzzle is much harder to pin down. I would say it is also not placeable on a spectrum like the other four elements. A street photo either has it or it doesn’t. I like to call it otherworldliness. It’s a sense that the photo portrays another world, one parallel to our own real plane of existence. The world in the photo has been cut off from the real world and placed into a world crafted by the photographer, a tableau existing solely for the subjects of that particular frame. The moment stands outside of time, becomes timeless, unique, and eternal. A photo with this quality can also be described as somewhat surreal, or vivid like a dream. Such a street photo clearly mimics our actual reality, but there is something uncanny about the scene it depicts, almost like an Escher staircase, seemingly impossible, or at least improbable. This quality will differ for each viewer as well, as there is a subtle interplay between the viewer and the photographer’s intent imbued into the photograph.
A fleeting glance amid colorful forms and dynamic lines.
A Tentative Conclusion
As you can see, the elements of street photography (as I see them) are not so black and white. There is a lot of ambiguity, and in a sense, it is easier to identify street photographs with the ‘I know it when I see it’ method. But as I already stated, to me this is not so much an exercise in photographic taxonomy. My goal is to analyze my craft, and through this introspection, sharpen the instrument of my mind’s perception that guides my eye and my camera. It helps to have at least some idea of what I’m looking for, so that I can more easily recognize it when I do see it.
