It seems to me remarkable that the amateur photographers who post on photo web sites such as Luminous Landscape and PhotoPXL aren’t more interested in street photography.
I understand that it’s a spooky experience when you first try to shoot a picture of someone you don’t know personally, but ever since Leica came out with Oskar Barnack’s little hand camera photography’s real significance has been in street photography, which has nothing to do with streets but rather is a record of human experience.
In the term “street photography” I include works such as Lewis Hine’s “Breaker Boys,” and Dorothea Lang’s “Migrant Mother,” both of which helped improve the lives of Americans. As a street photographer you might not be able to bring about vast societal change, but you at least can point out to those who experience and sometimes struggle with life’s peculiarities that they aren’t alone.
There have been some very good landscape photographers. Ansel Adams comes to mind. But I’ve never seen a photographic landscape that honestly can compare with something like Albert Bierstadt's painting, “Among the Sierra Nevadas.” When you use a brush you’re not constrained by problems with linear perspective, color relationships, or what’s really there in front of you. I’ll never believe the deer actually were there when Bierstadt painted “Among the Sierra Nevadas,” but the emotional thrust that caused him to put them into the painting certainly was.
A photograph can’t record a missing emotional thrust. On the other hand a painting can’t begin to substitute for the immediacy and believability of a good photograph. It seems to me that neither immediacy nor believability are important in landscape photography unless your photograph is intended to advertise real estate for sale and you want to avoid a lawsuit.
But if you’re trying to portray human life as it’s being lived, photography can do the job much better than painting. When I think about comparisons between the believability of a painting versus the believability of a photograph I think of Edgar Degas’s painting, “L’Absinthe.” That’s about as close to street photography as you can get, but it doesn’t really do the job. If you want reality you need a photograph like Garry Winogrand’s “Los Angeles 1969,” where the set-off between the crippled young man in the wheelchair and the girls passing by is a heart-striking reality.
The word “amateur” doesn’t imply incompetence. The word comes from Latin’s “amor,” which translates as “love.” So, if you’re a competent amateur photographer and you do photography because you love images of the world around you, get out there and shoot what’s really important to all of us: people, doing the things people do.
