Thanks Russ. Just curious, and this might be something for another time, but why always add "street" to the addaboy? How about simply good photography.
Actually, it was an attagirl.
But to answer your question as best I can: I love all kinds of good photography. I kid people on LuLa about landscape, but photographic landscape can be wonderful if it's properly done, though I really do believe an inspired painter can produce landscapes that are more moving than the best landscape photograph.
But in the end, I think exposing and commenting on the human condition (to venture a cliché) is what a camera really is for. So what kinds of photographs do that? I could make a fairly long list of kinds of photographs involving people that don't do that: wedding photography comes to mind as well as the portraits and cute kid pictures I see in the local pros' windows. But to avoid dragging this out, let's cut to the chase and talk about Cartier-Bresson.
Henri shot in a wide range of photographic genres including environmental portraiture, and a lot of critics rave about his portraiture. But the only portrait of Henri's I think really conveys something important is his portrait of Ezra Pound: a pathetic, sunken, literary giant who betrayed and diminished himself as well as his country. All that comes across in that picture. According to what Cartier-Bresson wrote about that session, the two of them stared at each other for about twenty minutes without a word spoken.
But the pictures by Henri that really move me are the pictures in which he caught something significant about human interactions. "The Lock at Bougival" is a prime example. Pictures like "The Lock" are what I'd lump into the category "street photography," though very few of them were shot on the street
The thing that comes across to me in your series is the aloneness of those people on the street. They're all moving together, but there's no interaction between them. Then there's the guy with the cell phone in #4. He's on the street with a mass of people, but he's somewhere else. A single shot would have been good, but the five shot series repeats and repeats and drives home the point.
On "Street & PJ" (which, unfortunately, involves very little street photography) we've had arguments about what street photography is, trying to define something that can't be put into words. In the end I'm in about the same position regarding street photography that Justice Stewart was in regarding pornography. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. I rarely see it, but when I do, I like to point to it and say: "THAT'S IT!"
