Well, I finally was able to stop laughing and get up off the floor. I went back through earlier posts and noticed this one from Ivo:
“Street photography changed enormously the last decades, because society became more complex and the human behavior/ social environments are in continuous change as well.”
I can tell that Ivo hasn’t read my essay on street photography. In that essay I said:
“An historical novelist guesses at the past on the best evidence he can find, but a photograph isn’t a guess; it’s an artifact that has captured time. And so, a street photograph that has captured not only the visages of its subjects, but the story that surrounds their actions can be a more convincing reminder of how things were than any novel or any straight, posed documentary photograph.
“Although good street photography is a powerful art form, it’s also a way of recording what people really are like and for those after us, a way of learning what we were like. It seems to me that besides the satisfaction it can give you, those two facts alone make it worthwhile.”
Ivo’s right. Social environments are in continuous change. They change one way, and then they change back again. Britain went from Elizabethan loose morality to puckered-lipped Victorianism. The reverse of that sequence is taking place in America right now. We’re moving away from early fundamentalism to an anything-goes society. Once our people feel the full effect of that change, we’ll move back the other way. And street photography, if it’s done right, will capture those changes. It’s not, as Ivo suggests, that street photography changes. Were it to change in accordance with “human behavior / social environments” it wouldn’t be able to record the changes in those things. In the end, unless the confusing name misleads its intended practitioners (the commonality of which LuLa has demonstrated), street photography is the constant.
Thanks Russ, now we are talking. I hope you have recuperated from your good fun.
Let’s also stop to underestimate each other’s understanding of photography, let’s have an adult to adult conversation.
As you know, I talk about pictures, not genres.
The results of shooting on the street (the pictures) changes due to the changing context, social, legal, etc. So we agree. Correct?
I have the impression you do not accept those changes in the contemporary photography. For that reason I question the so called ‘rules of street photography’ and anything else that put boundaries square on today’s society.
Theoretically, I’m with you about how a fixed window shows the world in change. But, practically, opening that window a bit more gives ‘more’ view of the world. And here is the paradigm shift. Change the set of rules reposition your window and give another look to the same world.
Now, I have posted the series under Street because I believe it is street. The ambiguity of the scene and the strange atmosphere, as Slobodan accurately described, the friendly soft character of the peoples, almost the family excursion level, makes it a registration of what is happening on a Saturday in A European capital town.
And here jumps in the limitation of ‘genre placing’
First reaction based on pre set definition: it’s photojournalism. And the questioning of the series stops instantly.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask : Why is the photographer doing this? And not automatically conclude: he doesn’t have a clue.
