Russ, to steer back to your original post, you claim that the fact the two actors in the image are interacting transforms the image from 'reportage' into 'street'. Why?
It's a fair question, Elliot. About all I can do is go back to this statement from an earlier post: "It deals with interactions between humans, other humans, and their environment, and as OmerV put it in another thread: ". . .street photography is not a hunt. It is a benign exploration of life in an effort to create a meaningful statement or poem."
Most street is also reportage. If the vendor in that first post had been working on his inventory and the bystander had been standing there looking at what he was doing that would be reportage, which is exactly the kind of thing most photographers on the street would shoot and call a street shot. But in this shot, something more is going on. I haven't the foggiest idea what it is, but there's a kind of relationship between these two guys that's intensely human.
I don’t know how to explain it more specifically than that. Which always is the problem when you try to talk about street photography in the abstract. The other part is that good street goes beyond reportage. It always is a poem. I have no idea how many people in this thread actually have looked at
https://luminous-landscape.com/on-street-photography/. From the tenor of the discussion I’d guess almost none. But here’s an example from that article of what Omer was talking about. It’s not an interaction between people. It’s an interaction between a human and her environment. More importantly, it’s a poem about a little girl deep inside her questing humanity. The best street photography always is a poem.