Being a pioneer does not on its own infer timelessness, or eternal relevance:
I disagree, Omer. I think being a pioneer does, on its own, infer timelessness. It may even infer eternal relevance. I think, for instance, that Albert Bierstadt's early paintings of the Sierras remain timeless, just as I think Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel remains timeless, and holds something as close to eternal relevance as we'll experience in this world.
Photography? Well photography hasn't the cachet awarded to painting, because after all, all you have to do is raise the camera and go click. It's not like having to work for hours and days with a brush. But HCB created what we now call street photography, and if you actually study
The Decisive Moment you'll see that many of his images are as timeless as Bierstadt's. People who see something "new and different" in photography evidently think that because in earlier photographs people dressed differently and perhaps acted differently, in those days humans were different, and therefore what we're seeing in photography nowadays is new and different.
What I often see in "new and different" street photography is (1) a failure to grasp the essence of what's in that early work, and (2) an attempt to go beyond photography's limitations in order to do "something new and different;" an attempt that falls flat. There are subtle messages about relationships between humans and humans and between humans and their environment in that early work that usually are missing in the stuff that's "new and different."
But it's not a dead loss. I also see plenty of street photography that grasps what HCB and his contemporaries taught.
I thought it was interesting that a number of people jumped on my "Telephone," which is pretty good street, but basically a visual pun. Everybody got the pun. It sort of jumps out and hits you. But nobody seems to have tumbled to the story in the picture I titled "More Real Street." That one doesn't jump out at you, but it's a hell of a lot more significant in terms of human interactions than "Telephone." That tells me something I guess I'd really rather not know.