Guy, Sorry, but what I see is one high-school type snapshot and two environmental portraits -- no street photography. You need to go to a library or bookstore, pick up a book of Cartier-Bresson's photographs, and study it.
Oh my. Thanks for the advice. However, it brings to mind two of the worst dangers in art -
emulation and assumption of
rules. And I thank you for presenting me the opportunity to say something about them. Emulation is deadly to anyone seeking their truth through art. To grab a forerunner's style, and assume it is a standard by which your own truth must conform, will kill the enterprise before it even begins. Whatever CBs truths were as he snapped his shutter are not my truths. His life is not my life. If art is life, how can I adopt his? This is not to deny in any way the appreciation of his life, no not at all. But it is to say that his is his, and mine is different. Necessarily then, my art wouldn't be his either. This confuses many people. This difference between appreciation and emulation. Never emulate! Always seek the truth within. And yes, CB had a certain way with his photographic truth, didn't he?
As to assumed rules of photography, be ever so careful of that tight box. A rule is a boundary generally claimed by someone who might have run out of ideas and seeks to assemble the world within the limits (rules) of their imagination.
This is street photography,
that is not! The more exclamatory the lecture, the more one should run. The first thing you learn in the study of art (study being the dictate of the poster) is that art advances in movements by means of rule breaking. A box becomes too stale for further exploration because of the existing rules, and then POW! someone breaks them, and all chaos breaks out. Rules are tools for learning, but not intended to bound one's own expressions and truths, lest the whole world of photography suddenly look like there was but one photographer!
Photography is by far the most difficult art form of them all, precisely because it is the most open-ended of them all. (Painters can only dream of what can be done with a camera.) But what makes photography ever the more difficult is falling into the trap of emulating others who have had notoriety. How many tedious attempts have we all seen of the photographer trying to emulate Ansel Adams, instead of seeking their own truth?
The thread title was "Love Real Street." And the obvious implication is that, "real" is a state of one's own truth in their photographs out on the street, not a universal dogmatic truth passed on by some High Priest of Street Photography. If you want to join a religion that's fine with me, but I choose to search out my own universals through photography, and they are not found at the local library or bookstore under "Cartier-Bresson."
