Do I understand correct: Street photography is about visual story telling?
Then define 'story' and how a story should be seen in a picture. Does a story needs to be a sequence of events, literally readable in the image? Or can the story be cerebral ?
Is it ok if the story is purely viewers projection, or should there be no room for interpretation. And if interpretation is allowed, what are the interpretation boundaries?
If an image is considerate not street, is this because it isn't or is it because the viewer didn't take the effort to look twice or is the viewer not emphatic enough or is (s)he not visual trained enough to read images.
Could the lack of a story tells more story than any obvious story can?
ceci ne pas une pipe or is it?
It's difficult.
Klein and Moriyama take no prisoners and neither do they really appear to be telling me anything. What they are doing is shoving slices of the pie of life into my face and saying, hey, take a bite on this!
I like that approach; I tend to think that the more romantic version that Russ espouses, the one that
suggests a story, is another branch of the family, far removed from the one that swears, winks at women and is, essentially, the one I like.
The old masters of the art lived in another age; they could wander around and snap as took their fancy, and people were not going to be terribly impressed or upset. Today, the public is hostile, and probably rightly so.
Let me tell you a true story. The very first prints that I saw developing in a tray belonged to a street photographer, a breed that existed legally via a hawker's licence obtainable from the local town hall. I got into the darkroom of one such snapper because another engineering apprentice in my year knew this guy, and did Saturday printing for him and, as I wanted to know how it was done, he took me along to see a darkroom in action (I originally typed acton, another place altogether, as Keith will know; you begin to understand how much work a keyboard represents for me?), and I discovered that being a steet photographer, in Britain, in the mid-50s, meant you were one of those chaps who walked around holiday towns and took pictures of the holiday makers, offering to send them a print for a couple of shillings or so, postage included! People did buy, a lot, and the pix really were delivered.
As people accepted those guys, so they would accept anybody with a different, unknown agenda. Today, I imagine those old street guys are feeding the dodos.
Today, the
pipe, were the shooter smoking one, would be rammed into his eye or down his throat.
