I believe that the difference between Krass Clement and the majority of street shooters that I come across online is this: he has the ability to capture the emotional expressions written large on faces, whereas today’s people are really not doing that, any more than they are trying to walk the footsteps of H-CB. What, it seems to me, a majority of today’s shooters is doing, is tracing the imaginary footsteps of the paparazzo. It looks like they are trying to treat the ordinary people on the street as if they were celebrities. It seldom works: they just look like ordinary people and bring nothing to the table. For people images to matter, first the people have to matter.
The same holds true with formal portraiture: you can make Helen next door look very pretty, but unless that Helen is also Helen of Troy, nobody gives a damn. That’s the obvious yet hidden secret that adds to the fame of our star photographers. They share the glory of their subjects. Think Bailey, Avedon, Leibovitz et al. It was ever thus. Magazines usually invest effort into getting ‘names’ on the covers: a major movie star will outsell an unknown beauty every time; just an extension of the same phenomenon.