Features

Is Street Photography Still Important in the Art World?

Chris Gampat
No Comments
11/13/2015
2 Mins read

Last Updated on 11/13/2015 by Chris Gampat

Image by Cosyspeed, Shot by Chris Gampat
Image by Cosyspeed, Shot by Chris Gampat

Before you begin this piece, calm down. No seriously, calm down.

You’re calm, right? Okay, that’s the closest to calm you’re probably going to get. To hop right into this, you should know that I (like many of you) love street photography. It’s a wonderful way for photographers to be able to hone their skills, express oneself and it’s a great way to improve your artistic eye. But considering all of the different types of photography that there are and where street photography’s position is in the world, it’s tough to believe that street photography could actually still be very important in such a saturated photography space.

Let’s analyze and break this down:

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Ilford Delta 400 scans image samples review (6 of 13)

  • Landscape photographers: important for documentary of land, global warming, and overall beautiful adornments for a home or apartment. Plus it helps tourism commercially.
  • Portrait photographers: headshots, the list can go on and on here. It breaks into fashion, dating, social media, and so much more.
  • Wedding photographers: yes, that’s all.
  • Photojournalism and Documentary: this will always be needed

Those are some big photography genres, but another large one is street photography. Street photography has no real commercial value except for an artistic print of a beautiful moment or one that can be stared at for a while by people. However, street photography doesn’t serve any major commercial reason for professionals if you really think about it–and the people that find some way to do this professionally are often doing it by selling prints or licensing images. If you’re licensing though, that goes into advertising and photojournalism in most cases. So that’s when street photography legitimately stops being street photography and instead about having a different major purpose.

Processed Kodak Tri-X
Processed Kodak Tri-X

Street photography’s main purpose is to just record life as it happens in public. It can embrace art and geometry, or it can embrace elements of landscape photography, portraiture, etc. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that–taking photos in public isn’t a crime in most places and it certainly isn’t a crime against humanity.

But as far as advancing the professional photographer, it doesn’t really seem to do much else than improve one’s own skills. For the amateur, hobbyist, and loads of folks on Instagram, it’s a way for someone to share a moment that they captured by applying their own creative vision to the scene.

chris gampat the phoblographer 7d street photos (4 of 6)

What street photography can do though is expose people to new locations to go shoot, teach people about lighting, geometry in a scene, and to embrace the artistic side of photography rather than being fixated on pixels and bokeh.

In the art world, it can be very much argued that street photography can have its place when done very well. But a strong argument can be made for many other genres. In the commercial world, street photography seems to have a tougher uphill battle.

What are your thoughts? How is street photography important to the art world and the photography community as a whole? Let us all know your comments below.

art commercial Photography professional street photography
Shares
Written by

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.