The reference, of course, is to “street”, as in street photography.
There was a time, quite a long one at that, during which I felt that street photography could be fairly well defined in a manner that left little - if any - room for misunderstanding of what was meant by that term. Today, I have grown very unsure of that belief, to the extent that I am starting to think that the term no longer has any kind of real meaning anymore.
As we know, language itself is in a fairly constant state of flux, and it shouldn’t really come as a great surprise to us that that can also affect the meaning of once-accepted definitions. However, I think that in this case, with any formerly accepted definition of street, the difficulty doesn’t arise from linguistic changes, but from the very nature of the beast itself. It has expanded, become more than a little fat. In fact, it has become a victim of its own popularity and, in a sense, of its accepted masters.
Some were inclined to believe that the definition really meant nothing more than that a particular photograph had been made in a street. Many of us were infuriated by that attitude, thinking it to be demeaning of the genre - or at the very least to be an unconscious revelation of an absolute ignorance of what street truly is. Today, I’m no longer so sure that the formerly simplistic view was not really the correct one.
The Internet has opened eyes to a much wider world of opinion and experience. It’s not really any longer safe to cling determinedly to some old standards. Not only has the original meaning been expanded, some formerly unseen versions of the art made visible, but some of the old heroes have had feet of clay revealed for the world to see.
If those feet are now in the public domain, some of those sainted reputations at least diluted somewhat, it’s my belief that we can thank (or curse) those gallerists and book publishers whose greed led to the raiding of archives and the unveiling of so much material that might better have remained unseen. When you’re dead, I suppose you can do little to protect that which you leave behind, your reputation included.
Another thing to remember is this: photographers who once made names and reputations from photo-journalism have seen their markets all but vanish. What can they do to replace them? In some very notable instances, their agencies have gone on to recreate them through the production of books: Magnum comes to mind. Think of some of the illustrious names active there today, and your mind goes to the contemporary idea of street, especially in colour, and with an apparently new kind of distinction that’s referred to as layering. Once, it was simply an unremarkable part of creating an image, and nobody thought to label it as a new exotic. Today, it has become necessary to gild lilies.
