Photographic Education and Critique: Genre

Street Photography - a definition from Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Street photography is a genre that records everyday life in a public place. The very public setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge. Street photographers do not necessarily have a social purpose in mind, but they prefer to isolate and capture moments which might otherwise go unnoticed.

Numerous photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, and William Eggleston, took photos on the street but did not consider themselves street photographers. Steiglitz, for example, photographed the streets of New York City and Paris at the turn of the 20th century during inclement weather, the effects of which were captured in his images. Abbott took a different approach: in the 1930s she documented urban architecture from below, emphasizing the contrast of light and dark and the magnitude of the built environment. Eggleston elevated colour photography to a fine art in his large-scale pictures of everyday, common places, people, and things often found in public or on the street. Though he was influenced by many of those who influenced the street photographers of the 1950s and ’60s, he was not chiefly interested in capturing the spirit of the street.

(above) 'The Steerage' - Alfred Stieglitz

(above) 'Newstand' - Berenice Abbott

(above) by William Eggleston

Eugène Atget, an early street photographer, documented the streets of Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before they were demolished and rebuilt according to the new city plans implemented by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Atget’s photographs were not mere documents or experiments with new technology. They reveal the city through his eyes. His work and fundamental understanding of photography as an art form served as inspiration to generations of photographers that followed.

(above) by Eugène Atget

The next generation of street photographers, though they likely did not refer to themselves as such, was ushered in by the photojournalism of Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. Kertész was working in Paris beginning in 1925, and by 1928 he was using a handheld lightweight 35mm camera that offered both mobility and greater anonymity. His street scenes of Paris sometimes captured people at close range in a manner not seen previously, exhibiting his bold risk taking and strong intuition about the camera’s capabilities.

(above) Bocskai tér, Budapest (1914) by André Kertész

In the 1930's ,Hungarian photographer Brassaï (born Gyula Halász), began to gain a reputation for his night photographs, using a technique he learned from Kertész while they were both living and working in Paris. Unlike his peers, Brassaï used a larger-format Voigtländer camera with a longer exposure time, forcing him to be more calculated and thoughtful in his practice than he might have been if using a 35mm camera.

(above) by Brassaï (born Gyula Halász)

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, an admirer of Kertész, is often credited with bridging art and documentary photography. Cartier-Bresson was one of the first photographers to maximize its capabilities. The Leica allowed the photographer to interact with the surroundings and to capture moments as they happened. Its relatively small size also helped the photographer fade into the background, which was Cartier-Bresson’s preferred approach. While discussing his work, Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase “the decisive moment,” which resonates particularly well with the street photographer’s aim: taking advantage of that split second in which the elements of a photograph come together with clarity. It is because of this fundamental understanding of the art of picture taking that he is often credited with rediscovering the medium all over again roughly a century since its invention. He took photographs for more than a half century and influenced generations of photographers to trust their eye and intuition in the moment.

(above) Henri Cartier-Bresson - 'Behind the Saint-Lazare Train Station' (1932)

In the United States just before World War II, street photography really began to take form as a unique subgenre of documentary photography. During the Great Depression, photography was becoming ever more present in books, newspapers, and magazines as well as in gallery and museum exhibitions. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott, among many others, were making sense of contemporary circumstances, not only the economic struggle but also modernization and the growth of cities and industry. With advanced photographic technology, they took to the streets in cities, towns, and rural areas across the country to document the people and places that encapsulated the American experience.

(above) 'Blind Man in Subway' - Walker Evans

(above) by Dorothea Lange

(above) 'Migrant Mother ' - Dorothea Lange (among 100 most influential photographs of all time)

By the close of the war and throughout the late 1940s and ’50s, William Klein, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, and Robert Frank were making careers of documenting American culture.

(above) by William Klein

(above) by Lisette Model

(above) by Helen Levitt

(above) by Roy DeCarava

(above) 'Soldier at Funeral' - Robert Frank

The street photographers of the 1960s and ’70s continued to work with 35mm cameras, many of them still shooting in black and white and some shifting to color film. Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus were notable American street photographers of that period.

(above) Joel Meyerowitz, Paris

(above) by Garry Winogrand

(above) by Lee Friedlander

(above) 'Stripper with bare breasts sitting in her dressing room, Atlantic City, N. J.' (1961)

by Diane Arbus

The generations of photographers that followed were greatly influenced by the personal approach. Photographers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries who took the street as a central focus include Bruce Gilden, Martin Parr, Mary Ellen Mark, Sylvia Plachy, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.