Hi Gregg,
I don’t know whether or not it’s “worth it.” One thing’s for sure: you’re not going to learn to do street photography from a “course.” You have to get out there and do it and do it and do it until it becomes second-nature to lift the camera and go click when you see something that interests you as you’re walking around with a camera looking for something that interests you. As the people in the course reiterate: the vast majority of your attempts will be failures, but that one extremely rare success makes up for all the failures.
One problem I have with the course is that a very fine photographer like Peter van Agtmael seems to believe that if you get a bunch of kids together and get them bouncing around as you photograph them, and as they know you’re photographing them, that’s street photography. Bruce Gilden believes that if he walks down the streets of New York City and pushes a flash into the faces of passers-by, that’s street photography. Some of the people who’d disagree are Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Walker Evans, Elliott Erwitt, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, to name just a tiny fraction of the people who defined the badly named genre of street photography.
To me, and I think the founders of the genre would agree, the function of street photography is to show human interactions with other humans and with the peculiar environments in which they live, undisturbed by the photographer. As soon as your subject becomes aware he’s being photographed he can’t avoid taking that fact into account, and behaving accordingly. Now you’re not shooting a subject in his natural state, you’re shooting a subject who’s being hassled by a photographer.
Which is not to say there isn’t worthwhile stuff in this “course.” To the contrary, it’s very worthwhile to see and hear these excellent photographers discuss what they do. Richard Kalvar’s approach comes closest to mine. For the most part he doesn’t believe in “engaging” with the subject, meaning asking “Is it all right if I take your picture?” He also believes in using a prime lens, because you know where the boundaries are with that lens. He also says that street photography is more like poetry than like photojournalism because it attacks on the emotional level. On the downside there’s Mark Power, a very excellent photographer who believes Atget did street photography, and who thinks he’s doing street photography with a view camera on a tripod. Atget did fantastic work, and the world would be a poorer place if his work disappeared, but real street photography wasn’t even possible until the advent of Oskar Barnack’s Leica in 1925.
So I can’t tell you whether or not the course is “worth it,” but I can tell you it’s a very enjoyable and often enlightening set of film clips and documents.
