Street Photography: A Discourse on the Narrative

Return to table of contents
Return to VJIC table of  contents

Roberto Muffoletto is director of VASA and is editor of VJIC. He earned his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop/ University of Buffalo and a Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison

Theme introduction

I think it is appropriate to begin this dialog with an interview with Harald Hagedorn, director and founder of street photography festival in Einzweiblicke, Germany.  In the interview Harald covers a number of his insights into the growing paradigm of street photography.

length: 28:39 minutes
A running transcript is an option the screen.

Over the last few years interest in “street photography” is represented by the increasing number of festivals and YouTube channels focused on street photography and photographers. In addition to an increasing number of festivals and social media channels, there is a growing number street photography workshops, exhibitions and publications.A quick search on Google  results in referring to over 200 notable individuals along with dozens of festivals and a growing number of publications focused on street photography. A search on Amazon (http://Amazon.com) produces a list of over 2000 publications noted as “street photography”. Include the images uploaded to Instagram and FaceBook, you have a massive amount of activity that falls under the street photography label. This translates into a huge number of photographers practicing street photography.With this amount of image making activity this VJIC theme inquires into the genre framed as “street photography” and will address a number of its narratives and assumptions it holds relative to “the” image, photography and the photographer. I will recognize the viewer or reader of the image, adding to the complexity of the street photography paradigm.

(The theme will point to various media, mainly YouTube, located outside the VJIC domain. To return to VJIC use your “back” option on your browser or return to the VJIC tab.)

Street Photography Definitions

Street photography has evolved into an international activity, and for many an understanding of what it means to make photographs (images), to be a photographer, what photographs are and what they mean. In a sense street photography has given license to casual and committed image-makers to take to the streets and for platforms, festivals and publishers to promote the activity and generate income.

After reviewing a number of YouTube channels on street photography I summarized definitions of street photography. My summary of guidelines and definitions is below:

Photographing on the street can be a key element of street photography,
but it is not the only criterion for defining someone as a street photographer.
Street photography is a genre of photography that involves taking candid,
spontaneous photographs of people, objects, and events in public places.
Street photographers typically aim to capture the essence of a place or a moment
and to document everyday life in an artistic and authentic way.

Further more, Mary Warner Marier (2012) offers to us an other working definition of street photography: “Photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places.” (from “What is Street Photography” YouTube video series by Brian Lloyd Duckett, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ufSDsdU46w , viewed 17 June, 2024) Mary Warner Marien is the author of several books and hundreds of articles on photographic history, art history, and art criticism. She has taught courses on photography and art, photography and literature, as well as photographic history.

In addition, Ashok Verma (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLjE9CPpCrQ) in his video “What is Street Photography” offers the viewer a set of guiding keywords that define street photography. Keywords offered by Ashok  are as follows: capture, moment, candid, daily public life and environment.

The above definitions provides a framework for understanding and
working (making images) on the street. Each word is grounded in an
historical discourse that legitimizes the activity. It appears that by
working outside the given definitions challenges the activity
and understandings of “being a street photographer”.

Terms like “capture” refers to the image maker as a hunter of sorts. It is implied that you capture, thus controlling the moment. Street photography requires that the subject of the images becomes an unknowing and maybe unwilling object within the frame, the image is “candid”. Here is where it really becomes interesting. The idea of “daily public life” is elusive. Public life for whom? Public life in various social economic and cultural frames will differ. If the photographer(s) does not understand the conditions and culture of the public they are photographing, if they have not done their homework on the culture they are witnessing, then the work on a larger scale is somewhat meaningless. But, no image is really meaningless. The viewer brings to the image a meaning, derived from their own cultural and historical experience, as does the photographer. (This topic of reader response and the construction of meaning will be covered in a future theme essay.

Meaningfulness is at the heart of the question. Do street photographers say anything at all that goes beyond the image, the shadow dance, the dance of colors and the unusual? Why are they out there making images? Recognizing that any understanding of an image, a signification, lies outside the frame of the image.  Images function as representations of the photographer’s intentions and understanding as well as the viewer’s decoding.

(Photographing “on” the street I believe, is different from what the above definitions defining the paradigm of street photography. The works of Robert Frank, Aaron Siskin, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Egglestonand, others sited were not “street photographers” by definition, but photographed on the street, their work being part of a larger inquiry, context and voice.)

The Narrative(s)

In the street photography narrative is found the concept of a “decisive moment” (credited to Henri Cartier-Bresson), an idea that that has guided many discussions on photography and behaviors, let alone classroom lectures and critiques. Counter to the “decisive moment” there is “the moment of decision” (Nathan Lyons). The “moment of decision” frames “image making” as the result of decisions made by the photographer, positioning the photographer as central to the making of the image, not the external world. The “moment of decision” is a stark contrast to the “decisive moment”.  The decisive moment  it looks to the external world waiting for it to come together at a point in time and the photographer records it. These two paradigms, “decisive moment” and “moment of decision”, provides positions or paradigms to unpack street photography. When useful to my discussion I will bring in notions on “Reader Response Theory” and “Reception Theory”. Both place the viewer at the center point for the construction of meaning –– semiotics and the social histrorical framework of the viewer. Not to consider the viewer’s relationship to the image limits any discussion of photography and photographers. It creates a voice of authority. Keeping in mind that the photographer, in most cases, is the first viewer. (I refer you to Fish, S. (1980), Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. As well as Ike Wills, Reception. Routledge (2017). and Lucian Berger (1966) The Social Construction of Reality, Anchor Books.).

This theme emerges out of my interests in images and image production, and in this case considerations on “What is Street Photography”. I have found that moving beyond the isolated image to a consideration of the photographer and their photographs as an historical culturally produced body of work, provides us with a deeper and richer understanding of what it means to make images and to read them (reading photographs implies a reader experiencing an image(s) a codification of meaning, working within the borders of time and culture).

Photographs are a product of social life and history produced to be “read” or experienced (post-modernism and critical theory refers to the constructed object as codified, as a text to be read). In most cases the first to experience a photograph is the photographer herself, the external viewer (as an object or on a screen) comes later, usually after some level of editorial decisions.

Unpacking The Moment

Greg Neville’s photography blog (https://greg-neville.com/tag/henri-cartier-bresson/) refers to the full negative of the iconic image “Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932”, noting that Cartier-Bresson did not print the full negative but cropped it. We can then consider this iconic image was the result of a number of decisive moments leading to the resulting print. In doing we so, we need to reconsider and understand the “decisive moment” as a story or myth that has taken on the weight of truth. What the viewer sees in this case is not the “decisive moment” but what has been called post-visualization. (Jerry Uelsmann is well noted for the concept of post-visualization (www.uelsmann.net/_img/writing/post-visualization.pdf)). It is important to note that the majority of images published only reveal the cropped image and not the full negative, thus providing a false representation of the image/negative made by Cartier-Bresson.

Why is this important to consider? Cartier-Bresson was a noted and well recognized Magnum photographer spanning many years inquiring into various topics and approaches. His work is identified by some as street photography (meaning taken on the street) and is held up as a model of performance and expectation. His image “Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932” (man jumping puddle) is used to exemplify his theory of the decisive moment. It is a theory that is promoted across the spectrum of street photography, YouTube videos, written text and photography textbooks. It is a conceptual framework that has guided many photographers, new and old, removing the decisions made to an external event. That is my point, photography is about decisions made by the photographer not the workings of the external world. The photographer is not an observer of the external world but is a creator of a world. The images we see in street photography are the result of decisions made and not moments external to the act. In short, in framing the continuous landscape it is objectified.

One of my photography mentors asked me; “Do you take what you want and do you want what you take?” (Nathan Lyons, during my time at the Visual Studies Workshop in the early 1970s). It is a reference to what changes from the experience of making to the experience of seeing an image.

The contact or proof sheet is a good example of the early stages of the reading/editing process, the decisions made. As demonstrated with the contact sheets of Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand below, the photographer made a number of photographs based upon a decision to record what was in front of their camera (this can be called working the scene, taking numerous exposures looking for the best one matching expectations). Out of those decisions a selection was made based upon some criteria. What the viewer sees/reads is the result of that editing process. The editing process is built upon expectations as is the initial exposure. Contact sheets provide us with a window to witness how an image-maker works through an event or location. The problem with digital photography is that there are no contact sheets by which to study the work of a photographer in an attempt to understand how they work and the decisions made.

Gary Winogrand

A quick note concerning the reading of a photograph. As one reads a text, both the author and the reader attempt to construct meaning or interpretation out of the organized letters/words provided. The same process unfolds in experiencing images. The viewer/reader of the images aligns cultural and historic meanings to the forms and objects shown (they are representations which refer). Including a social/cultural and historical element(s) in the interpretive process increases the demands upon the photographer and the viewer/reader of the image(s) to create meaning. In short, photographs show representations removed from their moment in time and space, the subject becomes an object. I should note that a “subject” has a history, a cultural position in the world, whereas the “object” has none until we say it does, then it also becomes a subject as a result.

Representations are symbolic references, they stand in place of things referring to ideas and concepts that exists outside the frame of the image but are brought to light when viewing an image.

Images represent

When photographing on the streets and viewing the resulting images (work) the images take on meaning within a social cultural and historical frame. They demand more than a cursory decisive moment to analyze the decisions made. I think it is important to note that the viewing context is critical to the construction of meaning.  An image shown on a garage wall, in an art gallery, family album or a PowerPoint presentation, has its meaning and importance effected by the context of observation.

Returning To A Definition of Street Photography

Length 13:45
for online live transcript: select icon
Larry Racioppo is a contributor to “Street Photography Magazine“.  His contributions, as well as other essays on Street Photography may be found at streetphotographymagazine.com

All practice begins with definitions and understandings. Why else would a photographer raise their camera, click their shutter or wait, if it was not guided by definitions, understandings and intentions. Photographers are guided by their understanding of what a (good, bad or acceptable) photograph is; what an image is within an intentional framework. Making an image may be rational in the sense of a “pre-visualization” of the final print or intuitive and subject to a later analysis in the editorial process.  Either way, the photographer or the editor act on various levels of definitions and understandings.

This theme started our inquiry by considering definitions and guiding narratives, leaving practice for a later essay. It is through given definitions which frame our thinking and what we consider to be “Street Photography”. How else can we say this is “not” street photography and this is. In the same way that we say “this is a good photograph and this is not.”

It is worth ending this essay with the “Encyclopedia Britannica definition of street photography as “a genre that records everyday life in a public place.” (https://www.britannica.com/art/street-photography)

Photographers have been documenting their environment since the invention of photography. The image “View of the Boulevard du Temple” by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, shows a Parisian street in 1838. Later encouraged by improvements in the portability and quality of cameras and materials, many photographers started to record urban and rural life. (In the beginning what could be photographed demanded a certain amount of light to record on a slow emulsion) Charles Nègre, Eugene Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Andre Kertesz, Berenice Abbott, Henri Cartier Bresson, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston are among the many iconic photographers who captured moments, and collectively changes in life. I add that in time photographers brought a political or social critique to their work. That is, they had something to “say”.

For example: Robert Frank’s photographs in The Americans were not a passive catch on the hip candid images. Frank was telling us about his perception of America in the 1950s. The images were about Robert Frank and where he placed himself. He knew what he wanted to say. Not understanding this is to miss the point in his work and that of Arbus and others.

Capturing the essence of the urban life is now both a popular form of art and an important medium of communicating the heart and soul of a society. Is “street photography” doing that? That is, do photographers roaming the streets making all sorts of images speak about issues and ideas that go beyond the image. Do they understand the image(s) as a reference to larger historical, social and political issues within a geo-historical framework?

In summery

go to top