Rob, perhaps there's a need for a Without Prejudice thread within the Street Showcase?
Have thought about that, but as I'm not likely to post many - if any - pics in the street vein, maybe somebody else might feel happier to create a silent zone where tranquility might reign? I enjoy street, but don't really feel I can find either subjects or nerve to do anything about it. I'm content enough with my windows, I think, which whilst facing a street, sometimes reflecting one, are not primarily about it.
Were I to live in a metropolis, I could possibly find myself more committed to trying it out...
On the categories thing: I think it's quite helpful in its way; can save a lot of bother looking at things of no personal interest.
That said, there is a problem when categories get hijacked. You mention glamour: was a time when glamour meant Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable et al. but today it represents the tawdry side of girl photography and, pretty much, soft porn. I never felt that way about my own calendars, but realised people who had never seen any of my work, on hearing that I shot calendars, would smile broadly and give a conspiratorial thumbs-up, as if they thought I was this lucky sod bedding all the best, most immoral girls in the world. For my part, I saw it as pix of pretty girls, period. I don't believe that
Page 3 was new glamour either, at least not the work that the late Beverley Goodway produced; he was rather kind to the girls and certainly didn't exploit them at all in the shots; those I knew who'd worked with him all thought him kinda sweet... I wonder what they thought of me.
You're right: candid and glamour are old species of animal, and that's why I thought candid was more embracing as it didn't subdivide too deeply, unlike what has become known today as street.
Colour a problem or not? Maybe because only Helen Levitt, apart from Leiter, are thought to have used colour widely for their work on the streets, so in a way, the genre side-stepped colour. Anyhow, as with war, colour glamorises and removes edge. Later people that climbed aboard the street gallery train, such as perhaps Joel Meyerowitz, use colour, but I don't see it has added anything to the work. Ernst Haas also used colour most of the time, but after buying his book Color Correction, I came to the conclusion that he didn't really do street at all: he made colour pictures on the streets. Unlike Leiter, however, I find his street shots rather clinical; possibly because everything looks just too damned sharp and controlled. But his books were something quite else.
That said, his black/white work on
The Misfits locations is beautiful; the star pics, of Marilyn in particular, are mostly candid in approach, and for that, so much more satisfying than the sterile, plastic star shoots of this era we enjoy now. The irony is, her flaws and less-than-perfect poses are what endear her to us: she is human, not a friggin' plastic robot out of the cupboard of sterile plastic robots. Ditto Jean Shrimpton in her day. As ironically as with Marilyn and Haas but for different reasons, it turns out that Leiter made what I think to be the finest shot of her ever, and so it wasn't Bailey got that prize! Wish it had been I!
