It’s a question that it seems everyone is trying to gatekeep the answer to — and everyone thinks that they’re right. What is street photography? The genre has been around for many, many years and is often attributed to the founders of Magnum Photos in some ways. While at times, it’s also attributed to great photographers like Gordon Parks. Ultimately, it seems to convey a documentary format, as the origins are with variants of photojournalism. But how it’s defined is really, really odd.
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What is Street Photography?
If you look at the work of people like Bruce Gilden, Joel Meyerowitz, Meryl Meisler, Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Jamel Shabazz, and many others, you’ll find lots of images of people in their work. But if you dove into the work of Daido Moriyama, another well-respected street photographer, you’d see how he breaks so many of these rules. Many times, he’s not photographing people, and at other times, he’s even doing a lot of editing to the images later on. It’s a stark contrast to the work of many of the other photographers the Phoblographer has interviewed over the years.
Even photographers who take blurry images of people like Olga Karlovac and Steve Madden produce what’s considered street photography. All of these folks also have artistic merits and accolades for their careers.
To provide a bit more context, let’s briefly analyze Robert Frank’s The Americans. “Going back to Robert Frank and his work in The Americans we have a much different story,” we stated in a 2018 article. “In isolation, he had some strong street images. But as a collective, he built a story that had a strong social impact.” Indeed, street photography and documentary photography can be so closely linked.
Other definitions tend to say that it should be out on the streets, candid and not posed, etc.
The origins of the format really only came about with the proliferation of 35mm film. It was with this format that photography started to become more widely available to everyone instead of needing to use a tripod, focus through bellows, etc. Of course, candids were shot even before then — but what really came with street photography and 35mm cameras is the ability to be virtually a fly on the wall.
In Pursuit of Authenticity
Evan Ranft, a YouTuber with no artistic accolades to his name and therefore lacking authenticity in the art world, demonstrates doing street photography with a phone, but includes various sample images without people. Yet his video has over 100,000 views. The big question, though, is whether what he’s doing is actually street photography.
That all depends on who you ask.
There are swarms of photographers who’d say “no” because the majority of the images don’t even have people in them. Specifically, there needs to be physical human beings — not just a sense of their presence.
“…do the labels really matter?”
But if you peruse some places like Instagram, you’ll see tons of photos tagged with #streetphotography that say otherwise. However, I think we can all agree that Instagram isn’t a place that values photography or authenticity at all. So we checked out Behance and VSCO — two places where serious photographers really go to post their work. And even there, we’d see images of just streets and buildings.
So I decided to go even more old school — the Hardcore Street Photography Flickr group. If you’re glancing quickly, you’d conclude that every single photo has a human in it. But if you dive deeper into the archive, the first page has a single photo that doesn’t have humans in it. The group, which is notoriously picky about which images make it and which don’t, has long been a standard for the street photography community seeking authenticity. Keep going through the archives, and you’ll see more photos without people in them that have been selected as street photography.
A Reddit conversation says that photos without people and shot in public should be called Urban Landscapes instead.
The Importance of Labels
Unlike classical music, there isn’t really a set group that defines it. Yet at the same time, institutions like the International Center of Photography have showcased street photography with people in the images. But like classical music, there are only a few street photographers whose work is actively taught in academic environments. Yet, many new street photographers have popped up in the past two decades who exhibit incredible work and have received many awards and accolades for the images they produce.
The problem is that no one entity has ever definitively defined street photography. Even worse, the internet contains tons of misinformation. But is it really misinformation if it wasn’t defined at all?
Adobe is sometimes known to use street photography in their marketing efforts — even if it’s questionable whether or not the work being showcased is street photography.
So here’s the big question: do the labels really matter?
Well, in the grand scheme of humanity, nothing matters. But if we’re getting into it, labels absolutely matter. There are tons of contests, books, gallery exhibits, etc., that matter for authenticity and for building a career. For this, I’d literally even point to my own career. Jorge Garcia of the New York City Street Photography Collective rejected my application in 2017 to be part of NYCSPC because I stated that I shoot street photography as part of my job. But throughout the rest of the photography industry, I’m known as a documentary/photojournalist/street photographer who is also very good at portraiture and conceptual work. Photographers can surely be multi-disciplined and wear many labels, but those labels should surely exist. I’m a certified minority business owner — and there are requirements that must be met to have that distinction.
Let’s look at this a bit deeper and in a more impactful way: think about what a soft drink is. In America, soft drinks are often associated with children, but in reality, their real label is anything that doesn’t have alcohol in it. Hard drinks contain alcohol. Legally, hard drinks can only be had by adults. But there are tons of adults who don’t drink alcohol. Does that make coffee a hard drink, even though parents limit their children from having it too much?
Similarly, in photography, underwater photography is distinctly different from astrophotography. One needs to be done underwater, and the other needs to incorporate the starlit sky into at least 60% of the image. Challenges like these have existed for years, however. Fotografiska NY did an exhibit on this a while back, where the ideas around traditional landscape photography have been changing. These challenges have really happened within the past decade, with photographers like Lizzy Gaad who are combining both landscapes and portraiture.
So here’s the bigger question: Who is going to come forward and dictate what street photography is? And more importantly, who is going to enforce it?
Additional input for this article was provided by Nilofer Khan.