Street photography

Abstract

Street photography can be defmed as a practice of soliciting subjects for impromptu portraits done on the street. The photographer trying to document the social portrait without being noticed by their subjects - people going about their business unaware of the photographer's presence, candid pictures of everyday life. Street photography is a kind of photography that tells us something crucial about the nature - human nature, life in the level we understand it. The combination of the instrument, a camera and the subject - the street, yields a type of picture that is idiosyncratic to photography in a way formal portraits, landscapes and other forms are not. While experimentations were made possible by photography - those performed by Eadweard James Muybridge and Etienne-lules Marey or events documented in photojournalism may yield more information, but Street photographers use the capacity for information more imaginatively. They think about tbis attribute of photography more profoundly than anyone else. There are two sides to street photography - a paradox to which the photographers are very sensitive. On the one hand, they try to get as many shots that they can get of a rapidly moving and changing subject, allowing them to strive for the one singular image - perfect in composition. On the other hand, they might make purposely open-ended, unbalanced pictures that can't stand alone and need to be played ofT on another, in groups, or runs in books. There are more technical details to this kind of photography. Motion blur can be used to the photographer's advantage. It can be a way to express energy on the street. A blurry picture of a fussy child, or a woozy picture of an old wotnaIl, can convey the 'feeling' of the image. The tradition of street photography is a diffuse, fragmented, intermittent one. But it is a tradition nonetheless - a succession of influences and inheritances. There are certain picrures, such as Paul Strand's Blind Woman of 1916 that everybody who took up street photography thereafter appear to have seen and been affected by it. This essay covers the history of portraits, which I believe was the fIrst step towards the basic street photography. What started as an image taken for e.g. sentimental keepsakes and historical recording developed into a search of the human's inner being ... captured on fIlm. The proille on Henri Cartier-Bresson serves as an example of a photographer that took picture of the 'moment of truth' and not out of routine.