No Russ. It isn’t people not understanding. Or not bothering to find out. It’s people that disagree with your weird non definition definition and find the stuff that you do like and approve of to frequently be boring, dull and outdated. Vacuous if you prefer.
You can be quite rude and scathing to people about their opinions and about thier photography. For some reason that eludes me people don’t wish to be rude back to you about your view or your photography. Now we are trying to have a constructive conversation here and you drag the same thing up again. Let me state it again quite plainly. Things change and your narrow definition of street is outdated and redundant. It allows no growth and nothing interesting to happen. You have killed off the sub forum, not the lack of skill and understanding of people who were initially excited about posting on the sub forum.
Personally I don’t care what you think of me or my photography but I know that people have been put off by what you say and some interesting people have stopped posting and I believe you have contributed to that.
I've been mulling that one over for a day or two.
I don't see Russ as ever being rude or offensive here - which makes him a bit of a rare
exception, proof of which you will find within this very thread... I don't think he's one who needs any lessons on good manners or deportment. He merely refuse to play the nice, blind guy when in the face of something he sees and believes is not right.
The thing is, in different ways, you are both right. Russ is right because he - and I - come, almost, from
the generation that defined street, gave it its roots. The reality is that the work that created the genre is hardly possible anymore for many reasons, both geographic and socio-political. The old world has been, literally, reconstructed with new concrete and neighbourhoods that supplied the ethos no longer exist. Even in my old Glasgow (Scottish one) the notorious and photogenic Gorbals saw a destruction and reconstruction in my own time in the city, and I believe it is now in its third iteration. The landscape is gone and with it the innocence (not to be confused with lack of crime) is no more. In the William Klein bio once shown on the BBC, Klein talks about going to Harlem and shooting kids playing ball in vacant lots; he says you could do that in those days... past tense. Helen Levitt made a name doing kids in b/w and, to a lesser extent, colour. Magnum still features an Italian photographer who made wonderful shots of slum kids in Sicily:
https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/ferdinando-scianna/Today, street has come to be considered a rotten, suspect and dubious species of work often associated with fears of child molestation and so on; many people generally hate being snapped by strangers and some, good luck to them, get violent about it and the personal intrusion it repesents. Some religions proscribe photography and people get angry about it for other reasons than those of westerners. In essence, both the photographer and the victim? know what's going down: some kind of visual joke or mockery, or version of - ah, aren't they cute? - at the subject's cost, but either way, a judgement.
So, what can people in love with their fantasy of the original genre do today? Exactly what they have done: create another thing entirely from their own current reality and possibilities, which is why you now get the styles that you do.
Whatever they are, they no longer fit the formula. And you and others are right to do what you do, but not right in claiming the same mantle.
Revisionism isn't only a political reality.
Rob
