Without any prejudice, I would like anyone interested to read the following article if you have not read it before...
Street Photography?
Russ, thanks for your response.
Eric makes some good points in that article, Fursan, but mostly what he does is illustrate once again that you can't define the street photography genre with words. You need to become familiar with the photographs that defined it to understand what's involved. You can't really do that on the web. You have to sit down with the books, one of which is
The Decisive Moment, and study what's there. And when you study
The Decisive Moment you also have to realize that HCB's early work is street photography, but later on he became a photojournalist and was shooting photojournalism, not street. His later stuff, Ghandi's funeral for instance, is a long way from street even though it's still Henri's poetic soul at work.
It's sort of like the definition of Haiku. There's a lot of poetry that fits the supposed 5/7/5 rule that doesn't really fall within the spirit of Haiku. I once was a visitor at a lecture on Haiku at Colorado College given by a Japanese professor who was big in the Haiku world. One of the things he pointed out is that Haiku really has to be written in Japanese because the visual effect of the characters is part of the effect. But he bypassed that point and got into the spirit of Haiku, which, as he pointed out, is it's most important characteristic. He illustrated his lecture with examples, since Haiku is like street in that words can't really define the genre.
Here's an example of my own:
Silent house! Darkness!
Children breathing softly. Wind. . .
Outside in the night.
In Haiku, as in street photography, within the genre's meaning there's great stuff at its core, but as you move away from that core it becomes less great, then less good, then, finally, just plain crappy. If you run through the pictures in this section of LuLa you'll be treated to that entire panoply of stuff that calls itself street photography.
