I would call Gilden aggressive, confrontational and nothing much more. Flashing faces like that is lousy technique, in my opinion. And once done, what do the pictures tell us? Nothing, other than that he stuck a flash in somebody's face and made a snap, and lived to do exactly the same thing again another day.
Parr is many things, apart from being a honcho in Magnum. In my opinion, he made a wider name for himself by making fun of the underclasses with which most parts of Britain teem. Exploitation, then, of the poor and unsophisticated. Whether that is any the less cruel that what Gilden has done to strangers is, at the very least, matter for debate.
Social documentary... just exactly what HC-B was paid to do by the left-wing press, who must have been privately delighted to have this rich kid playing along with them and singing their song. So, by extrapolation, HC-B is not street?
As Keith wrote, hard to find a convincing definition of street...
Agree 100% about Gilden, I think I would not like the man in person.
Parr is a different story. For me, as not being British, I feel he is doing a lot of self criticism, A Brit exposing 'British'. I would rather use the word 'documenting'
Like Harry Gruyaert documenting the Flemish
Like Seidl documenting the Austrian
Like Evans documenting the Alabama sharecropper families, etc
To be fair, Im not a huge HCB fan. Some of his pictures are absolute icon's, but that can also be said of images by photographers of a lesser God. :-) I visited the HCB foundation house in Paris twice, the deception was huge. Probably my expectation where to high, don't know.
Good street photography is rare. first of all because peoples tend to think in terms of definition, and this is the beginning of the end. When a style get poured in axioma's, it's death.
Black and White, tough very beautiful if executed good and skillful, is a bit boring in my opinion. (I started a movement few years ago: BAWIB, black and White is boring, the movement was not very successful, haha) Color is much more complex and adds layers on top of the photographic possibilities, etc.
For me, interesting (street) photography is often in color.
Saul Leiter, Robert Walker and even Mitch Epstein produced fantastic images, some would qualify to street if definition is applied, others definitely not. It is all more deep and wide than the Straight Jacket of the 'street photography dogma'
A story is told not only on the street, it's about portraiture, social context, situational images, etc
There is so much to see and to capture, we should not limit ourselves by definition or dogma.
