Part of the problem with 'street' lies in its definition: this ain't news - we've been here so often.
Perhaps the way to look at it is to realise that any tight definition is, ultimately, self-defeating. The genre has encompassed so many different people over so many years that it is a nonsense to say Joe is street but Jim is not, regardless off the fact that both work on the street. It seems to me that the traditional idea of street is confined to the close, confrontational as in Klein, possibly also in Frank; certainly so with Winogrand and somewhere in the middle with Joel M. Just for starters. Arbus? I don't think she's street at all: I think she was into something almost too personal and not in the least psychologically healthy, though that's not to say that none of the others verged on the obsessional too.
Some, such as my own favourite, Leiter, worked for years on the street but also did fashion; his street is beyond the confrontational: it is into the artistic, the appreciation of colour, of black and white, of blocks of tone. In short, he's a visual poet in a way that nobody in his right mind could describe much of what contemporary street seems to be. He was, of course, also a painter.
I look at my own few attempts at some part of the genre and try to figure out just where the hell it fits - if it does, if it could, or if I should even care about any of that. This is shot on the street; is it street; who knows?
All I can say is that I enjoy doing this kind of thing, more than I imagined that I might when I started just a few months or so ago – at least, that's how the personal time-frame seems to me right now. I might have started years ago – can't really see it, though.
But street awareness? That dates back to the 50s with the British magazine edited by Norman Hall,
Photography. At the same time there was the
American Popular Photography Annual and its sister,
Popular Photography Color Annual. These three were originally more valuable (photographically and educationally speaking) to me than anything else; I kept them for years, right until we were leaving to settle in Spain, at which time I donated the collection to a Glasgow studio where, I suspect, they ended up as fillers for setting up and adjusting still life levels under some tartan cloth... I have no memory about what happened to my many years of
Playboy.
If there's a single, powerful message that comes through to me, it's something upon which I have commented before: the best shooters of them all were Jewish. I have no sure idea why this might be, though my mind suggests that it comes out of hard experiences, a sense of never really belonging anywhere; the permanent voyagers and consequently, always distanced just enough to be astute observers.
Rob C
