Street Scenes

Did you watch a few of the videos about street photography mentioned in the last post?

What did you notice?

When I watched a lot of them I noticed there appeared to be several distinct styles of street photography.

One was more documentary than anything else. Images of buildings or statues and artwork showed the photographer was much more of a passive observer than anything else. These photographers almost never featured people in their images or if there was a person it was only to provide perspective to the actual scene and faces almost never were featured.

Another form was more editorial where it was obvious that a story was being told. One guy took his camera back to his old neighbourhood shot images of the buildings and the people. More and more of his images focused on the people living in this community. His work became an homage to the community of his childhood.

Formal portrait photography was interesting. One guy shot 4″X5″ film portraits of New Yorkers on the sidewalk. A 4″X5″ camera on a tripod is a big contraption made more bizarre because the photographer had to wear a cape type cloth used to cover the focusing glass plate. Every shot cost something around $15 US! Another photographer always asked individuals, couples and groups for their permission to be photographed and then he posed them. In doing so he brought out something new in his images of people on New York streets.

Then we come to the run-and-shoot group. Never asking permission and often using really wide angle lenses and settings that kept everything in focus the results of this rapid sniper-type shooting ended up looking to me a lot like random snapshots. That is random snapshots until a pattern began to emerge from the work. Not my kind of shooting but I do get it beside just about everyone was shooting with very expensive Leica rangefinder film cameras. I owned a Leica M4 and four Leica lenses back in the 80s and I sold them. It was a sale I regretted ever since.

And then we come to the artist. While all of the above forms could be called artistic there are some photographers who appear only to shoot patterns and geometric figures where people, if they appear at all, are in silhouette. They play with the available light and seek out places where the light creates memorable images.

BTW photo (above) is from the January walk through downtown Toronto streets by the Toronto Film Shooters group.