[quote name='RSL' date='Apr 19 2010, 05:03 PM' post='360967']
"Seems to me that during the Spanish civil war only one side supported Franco, and the Americans, Capa for instance, who joined the fight joined it on the other side."
And ain't that surprising, when the 'other side' was the communists! Imagine Spain today if Franco hadn't triumphed!
"I never lurk. I especially never lurk behind a bush. I wouldn't be able to get a decent shot of you that way."
I'm sure you don't - it was just a figure of speech.
"Rob, it's not the skills of the hunt that are the important thing about street photography; it's the truths about human life. Take a closer look at the picture I posted in reply to one of Stamper's posts and tell me that the only significance in that picture is that it's the result of a successful hunt: antlers on the wall as it were. I don't believe you really believe that."
If you look at the Is it Art section, you'll see that I started a topic on Street, wondering about both its function post shooting and suggestions as to why folks do it.
I admit freely that it has fascinated me all my life, not that I particularly wanted to do it, but the motivation for it in other people was the big question uppermost in my mind. The closest I ever got to doing anything like it was in Rome. I was staying with the family of a cousin of my mother's that lived there, and it was fully in the time of the Dolce Vita syndrome, and I think before the commemorative/eponymous movie. I had been asked along to a birthday party somewhere in the city one night and I took along the camera and flash just for fun. After the meal, when the thing was breaking up, my group went along the Via Veneto and we had a giggle pretending to be doing a paparazzo/starlet number: the pretty girl with the cousins walked briskly along with one hand over her face, the other outstretched towards me shouting no foto! no foto! After some of that, I walked along the other side of the road and stopped off at different café tables shooting God alone knows whom - all of those girls happy as hell to pull poses and smile their heads off at a total stranger. Amazing, the power of the camera to corrupt.
But that's not street, in the sense of Arbus or Winogrand or any of the latter day saints. It was more tabloid scandal stuff, which, you have to remember, had been mainstream in Europe for decades before it hit the UK. I'm not sure when it happened in the States - maybe the National Enquirer or something that sounded like that pre-dated the UK passion for pap. In Rome, the Burton/Taylor thing fed hundreds of snappers for ages - even made the negroni world-famous. And that was well before OK! or British Hola were even imagined.
Love photography, such a velvet emotion!
Rob C