This didn't make it into Photo Technique, and I have too much work to do to bother sending it out to more magazines. So...
On Street Photography
by Russ Lewis
What is street photography? Seems Wikipedia is about the only reference that's come up with what could be called a dictionary definition. But you don't need a dictionary to define it. Study the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, David Seymour (Chim), Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Brassai, Walker Evans, Elliott Erwitt, Mark Riboud, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt and Robert Frank, who are only a few of the masters of street, and you'll have a much better appreciation for what street photography is than words ever can give you.
A picture of a person on a street is no more street photography than a picture of a street is street photography. A good street photograph is a story, though the story may be confusing or even one you'll never be able to decipher. There must be interesting human behavior in the picture -- something beyond a simple shot of a person or people, no matter how weird the people are, no matter how much they fit stereotypes, no matter how briskly they walk, no matter how they slouch against the stoop. Often there's an element of mystery in the story, and unless the picture makes you think, it's not much of a street photograph.
Some have the idea that only the "urban scene" lends itself to street photography, but if you look at the work of the masters you'll discover that the world is full of rural streets that lend themselves to street photography, and you'll also discover that most great street photography doesn't take place on streets.
Cartier-Bresson's "Behind the Gare St. Lazare" is a perfect example of some of the things a photograph needs in order to be a real street photograph. The action itself is straightforward: the man has jumped off the ladder and is about to land in the water. His splayed legs are echoed by the splayed legs of a dancer in a poster on the fence behind him. The picture is an example of great composition, the kind of intuitive geometry for which HCB was famous. But why has the man walked toward the flood on the little ladder? Since it's obvious he's not dressed for wading why is he jumping into the water? There's another man in the picture, slouching behind a fence. What's he doing there? Why is the partially destroyed poster on that desolate fence? Then there's a chimney and some foggy roofs in the background that give an ominous flavor to the whole thing. It's an arresting and mysterious image -- exactly what a street photograph should be.
People who haven't studied street photography tend to confuse it with photojournalism. It's true that some of the photographs included in a journalism shoot might qualify as street photography, but photojournalism requires a kind of storytelling a single picture can't satisfy. Besides that, mystery isn't normally something an editor is looking for. In most cases the point of the story is to remove the mystery. A good picture story needs a central shot that can grab the viewer, and that's often the one that could qualify as a street photograph, but the story also needs peripheral shots that work to focus the central shot. You can see an example of this in Cartier-Bresson's book, The People of Moscow. If you're familiar with Henri's street photography you'll recognize that though the pictures in the book share his mastery of composition, many of them don't contain the depth that would make them good street photographs.
Few of us ever will shoot the equivalent of "Behind the Gare St. Lazare." But how do you go about getting a photograph that meets the basic requirements of a good street photograph, even if it's something much less than the "Gare?"
One thing most of us shouldn't do is walk down the street like Bruce Gilden, wearing a mesh photographer's vest, carrying a camera in one hand and a flashgun in the other, shoving the camera and flashgun into people's faces and blinding them. I'm always amazed when I see a decent street picture by Gilden, and I'm always amazed when I realize he's still alive. Gilden's flashgun blows out the faces of most of his subjects as you can see in his short YouTube clip at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRBARi09je8, and he's not photographing people as they are. He's photographing people as they are after he's hassled them.
Though I've been doing street photography since 1953 I have yet to come up with any universal rules for finding and capturing good street photographs. But here are a few ideas:
How do you find good street photographs? You can't plan street photography the way you can plan studio photography or landscape photography or even wildlife photography. There's that old saw: "f/8 and be there," and the "be there" part is right. You can't do street photography sitting in front of your TV or relaxing with a drink. And there's another old saw you should consider: "The best camera in the world is the one you have with you." The corollary, of course, is that if you're there but without a camera you're out of luck. Yes, you need to take a camera with you when you go out, but having a camera with you isn't going to lead you to a good photograph. I keep coming back to Cartier-Bresson because not only did his pictures define street photography, he was able to write about it coherently. He said: "Photographing is nothing. Looking is everything." And that's the key. You're unlikely to find a good street photograph unless your camera is in your hand and you're actively looking.
Another thing HCB said was: "approach tenderly, gently on tiptoe - even if the subject is a still life. A velvet hand, a hawk's eye - these we should all have." ...which sort of lets Bruce Gilden out of the picture. Or does it? If you look at Bruce's pictures on the Magnum photographers web page you'll see that in spite of his nasty approach he's made some pretty good street photographs, as well as some pretty bad ones. So, how you approach your subjects is a subjective thing: something you have to work out for yourself. I'm of the Cartier-Bresson school of thought, but Gilden and others like William Klein have proved that that's not the only possible school.
How do you capture a good street photograph? If you look carefully at the street photographs of masters like Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, or Robert Frank you soon realize that the best of them are snapshots: gut reactions to what they saw before them, not planned intersections with the scene. There's no way HCB's conscious mind could have registered all the elements of the scene in "Behind the Gare St. Lazare" before he tripped the shutter. That truth is reinforced by the fact that "Gare" is one of only two photographs I know of that Cartier-Bresson cropped. There was a fence off to the left, and he didn't have time to move to the right before it was time to shoot. You can see the original, un-cropped version in his book,
Henri Cartier Bresson: Scrapbook.So there are two things you need to learn to do: First, you need to practice composition to the point where it becomes intuitive. You don't have time to line up all those elements of geometry with, say, the "rule of thirds." You have to see it whole in your viewfinder without stopping to analyze.
But in many cases to wait for your conscious mind to register both the facts and the geometry is to miss the picture. So, the second thing you need to do is learn not to rely on your conscious mind, but to rely on your unconscious: to react instinctively. There simply isn't time to think about it. In the end, to do good street photography you need to practice and practice and practice. You need to become so familiar with your camera that you don't have to think about it, any more than you have to think about shifting gears when you're driving a stick-shift car, and you have to be able to frame and shoot a properly composed picture without thinking about it -- with your unconscious making the decision.
Spending days on the street looking, and rarely seeing a situation worth shooting can become pretty discouraging, so there's a temptation to just shoot some people on the street and call it a street photograph. There's nothing wrong with shooting something you know isn't going to be good, in fact that's part of the training process. You need to do that again and again to learn to get the geometry right. But when it comes to posting or displaying your photographs you should be extremely critical, and to be able to be critical in an informed way you need to become familiar with the genre. That calls not only for reading, but for studying the work of the masters, including the ones I listed near the beginning of this tirade.
Again and again I see howlers people post on the web as street photography, and I try not to laugh too hard because I've shot my share of flubs like these too. I'm sure I'm far from the only one who reacts that way. Fact is that even when you get good at street photography you'll shoot bags and bags of bloopers, a smaller number of not too bad shots, and the rare picture you should be willing to show.
Beyond the rare picture that's showable there's that even rarer picture upon which you'd be willing to hang your reputation. If you can average one of those a year you're getting pretty good.
At this point I'm sure you're wondering, "Who the h--- is Russ Lewis, and where does he get off lecturing about street photography?" It's a fair question. I'm not a professional. The word "professional" means you make a sizeable chunk of your living shooting pictures, but it doesn't say anything about the quality of your work. I did some professional work in the sixties, hated it, and quit doing it, so I'm an amateur and I plan to remain an amateur in the true sense of that word. In other words, I do photography because I love it, and street photography has been one of my primary thrusts since I started. I've had some hits, like a Spotlight award in B&W magazine this year, and a fair number of sales out of several local galleries before the economy drove them under, but I'm certainly a comfortably long way away from being a famous photographer.
So to see whether or not it's worth paying attention to my words you'll have to go to my web, look at my pictures, and make your own decision. You may even decide I don't know what I'm talking about. That's okay, you have to be the judge, just as you have to be the judge when you're out there, on the street.
Russ Lewis
www.FineArtSnaps.com8/26/2011