I have been noticing that much of the "street photography" on this site is relying heavily on signage. It can. It shouldn't. The best doesn't.
Peter
Hi Peter,
It's pretty obvious I pissed you off with my "so what?" comment. Sorry about that. If you were familiar with the great street photographers you'd realize I was paraphrasing Walker Evens (q.v.). Evidently I pissed off Terry too, who, if his web is any indication, also seems unfamiliar with street photography.
And that leaves me with this question: what makes you think signage shouldn't be used in street photography, and why do you think the best street photography doesn't use it? From your web site I see you're a landscape painter. I don't see anything there that would indicate you have a background in street photography or that you've done any street photography or for that matter much photography.
What is "good" street photography? It's the kind of photography that, to rely on a cliché, enhances our understanding of the human condition. Street is by far the most difficult of all photographic genres. It gets confused with photojournalism, but the purpose of photojournalism is to explain. The purpose of street is to transmit a transcendental experience. You can see the difference by looking at Cartier-Bresson's wonderful, early street shots -- during his surrealist period -- and his later work in a book like
The People of Moscow. In the book he was doing photojournalism and the book contains very few real street photographs.
I agree with Stamper that the definition of street should be broad. On the other hand, without some kind of limit a term like "street photography" becomes meaningless. A picture of a street is not "street photography." I also agree with Stamper's "recent magazine" that it's possible to have street without any people in it, though just off hand I can't think of a good example.
Which gets me back to the use of signs in street photography. To me it depends on whether or not the signs show an interaction with or a relationship to the people in the photographs. If what the picture shows is a funny sign, and that's all it shows, even though there are people in the picture, it's not good street. Which means that Stamper's picture above, even though I like it a lot, fails the test. I suspect he knows that, because he's a very good street photographer.
Rather than go further into my ideas on the vagaries of street photography I'll point you to two articles I wrote on the subject:
http://www.russ-lewis.com/essays/OnStreetPhotography.html, and
http://www.russ-lewis.com/essays/WhyDoStreetPhotography.html. I submitted the first one to Photo Technique, which was on its uppers at the time and didn't accept it. At that point I gave up and published both essays on the web. As a result they've had a lot more readers than they'd have had in a magazine. According to my web analyzer the second one is the more popular of the two.
I've been doing street since 1953, when I was flying fighter-bombers out of Taegu, Korea. The war ended and I got very interested in shooting pictures of the people on the streets of Taegu. I still love looking at street photographs and shooting them.