Regular porno, or Facebook porno.
And that's why
genre is so important, and an understanding of what it signifies matters!
Porn itself is full of subdivisions that beggar belief. Every fetish has its special snappers and "artists" trying to get into the mainstream and thus into the big bucks and gallery representation. And often, they succeed. Ever wonder why Mapplethorpe managed to get representation in such a big way? Think about it. Not much to do with the Hasselblad, poor thing.
In the street department much confusion reigns because there hasn't been enough reading - sometimes - about its genesis. And that's where and why it often gets confused with reportage.
The vast majority of the early Parisian stuff was shot to order, as illustration for left-wing magazines and newspapers. As such, it wasn't street, but reportage,
a story with a publication-led agenda. That's why we get so much "quaint" material shot in poor neighbourhoods full of raggedy kids, cheap cafés and depicting layabouts and people doing hard, manual labour in markets. It's supposed to contrast the nobility of the poor workers and their honesty, on the one hand, with the decadent company owners (that employ them) on the other. (Even W. Eugene Smith's essay on Pittsburgh couldn't leave out references to the super-rich and their mansions, clubs and restaurants. Why do so many photographers have this hang-up?) Many of those new migrants, mainly Jewish, had to learn the language as they worked, making life even more complex as they plied the only trade they could. It's worth noting that few got rich out of photography when they were doing it for a living; yes, some went on to greater personal comfort and fame in much later life and in a very different social atmosphere where photography and art were presumed to have met.
Perhaps the most simple way to differentiate between street and documentary is this: documantary tries to tell a story about something over a spread of associated images, whereas street exists for no other purpose than to pick up on the quirks of mankind at large.
That's the main reason why I feel that "street art" has to be seen under a different light: it isn't to do so much with people doing things that are odd or even peole looking a bit crazy themselves, it's about a sense of graphic design as found out there in the public domain, and mainly at street level, not up in the sky as with architectural street.
Anyway, real architectural photography is another animal altogether: it's a highly skilled specialist job of itself. I sometimes wonder how such photographers feel when confronted with what is loosely defined as architectural photography here and elsewhere within the amateur world. I suspect those folks are rather concerned with genre too!
