Does Your Street Photography Need To Mean Something?

Have you watched endless You Tube videos of Face Book photography sites where the street photography seems absolutely vacuous, meaningless and well…boring?

If so, maybe you aren’t seeing what the artist saw!

Case in point is an excellent video on You Tube from “The Photographic Eye” site called The Problem with “Art” Photography Explained For Beginners.

Watch it and tell me what you think. Do your street photos need to have some meaning attached to them? Do they need to tell a story? Is it important they have some redeeming aspect to them?

As a professional photojournalist all of my thousands and thousands of images shot for newspapers and magazines and street work like jazz festivals and street parties, parades and protests all said something.

I was telling a story. There was some meaning to it. They illustrated an event.

But when an artist as opposed to a photojournalist goes out shooting they are looking for something else.

On a recent walk with the Toronto Film Shooters I was walking and talking with a guy who was shooting an ancient Leica 35mm film camera. As he would stop to look at a scene I paid close particular attention to what he was doing.

Maybe not so surprisingly I didn’t get it. He was looking at a brick wall of a building or a chain barrier along a sidewalk. Where were the people? Where was the action?

And yet when I saw some of his images on FaceBook I could see now what he had been seeing. There was an artistic purpose to his work that had eluded me. He was seeing things I wasn’t seeing.

The solution to this lack of vision is to keep walking and shooting and slowly improving and not to get discouraged or intimidated (my friend had his masters of fine art degree) and believe in yourself and what you are doing.

BTW as mentioned before if you’re not seeing stuff when you walk consider working Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way book as we all need some guidance and help with our artistic vision.