Why is so much street photography just bad snaps?

I am struggling to understand why so much of what we see from street photographers especially on FaceBook, Instagram and YouTube is so very bad.

Often it’s bland, vacuous and of no purpose whatsoever.

And then you run into someone like Steven Tanno’s YouTube videos of shooting street photography in places like Kyoto, Budapest, Vienna, Istanbul among other exotic locations and the answer becomes clear.

Tanno’s videos are more travelogues than anything else. He goes somewhere alone and wanders the streets with video and still cameras in hand. His work is meditative and relaxed. He features a lot of his meals eaten alone in local restaurants. When shooting he is not confrontation although in some of his work in places where privacy trumps freedom of expression you can see people turn away from him.

He’s not a great photographer nor an especially talented videographer but he does have one secret power. You’ll see it every so often in an image he posts that absolutely captures the moment or the place in which he, as the photographer, has choosen to share with us.

This is the magic that eludes so many of us as we walk the streets of our towns and cities.

You see I have come to believe that of all the forms of photography street photography is one of the hardest to understand and most difficult to shoot.

Street photography, contrary to many views, isn’t about the street. It certainly isn’t about the people. It may not even be about the place. What it is about is the photographer showing us something we may not have expected that in one photo captures the essence of what he or she as an artist sees.

Think about some of the great street photographer’s works. Almost without exception none of the people whether as subjects or background are the most important thing about the image. In fact, most often they are merely placeholders giving scale or framing to what the photographer is attempting to show you.

Same for famous buildings or parks or boats. None of that is actually the subject of the artist’s vision.

No, street photography is all about the photographer. It has nothing to do with the photo but everything to do with the intrepretation of the artist. So the work of the street photographer is to produce art and in doing so his or her work is unique and beyond criticism. Oh, you may have an opinion of what you like or don’t like but that’s your opinion and has nothing to do with the work of the artist.

Where in some other forms of photography it’s perfectly acceptable and considered necessary to come home with thousands of frames of images (think bird photography or vacation shots) the street photographer, often shooting using a black and white camera, may only shoot a few frames on a 2 1/4 format film camera like a Rolleiflex or 24 or 36 frames on a 35mm film camera like a Leica or Nikon.

A single image, framed, composed, exposed and focused in the way the artist intends is all that is needed. Anything else would be excessive.