Funderburg - Street photography: document your world

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Contents

Author photo by Robert J. Hill.

Andrew Funderburg worked as a professional wedding and portrait photographer in Japan and the United States from 2003 to 2010. In 2008, he founded Fundy Software and retired from photography as a profession two years later. He has lived in Paris, the Republic of Moldova, and Japan. He has been to over twenty different countries and speaks four languagesEnglish and Japanese fluently. He has a love of people and a love of street photography, which he has been practicing for almost two decades.

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I f you ask a hundred street photographers to define street photography, youll probably get a hundred different answers. But, to put it succinctly, street photography is the act of hitting the streets with a simple camera and capturing everyday life.

To do it well, the photographer has to be part of the actionpart of the moment. You must be willing to be yelled at, and brave enough to pick up your camera and point it at a stranger.

But when the moment is perfect, magic happens. And when it does, the viewer can not only see the moment and the soul of the person in the photograph, but also feel a slice of history, frozen and preserved for the future.

As a husband, a father, and a business owner, Im pulled in many directions. Its rare when I get to hit the streets with the luxury of a few hours to dedicate to photography. Most of the photos in this book were taken during those ten minutes stolen while my family was shopping for shoes, or on the way to a convention.

You dont have to be a full-time artist to dedicate yourself to street photography. You just need fifteen minutes here or fifteen minutes there. Sometimes, just a few minutes of freedom can reveal a gem you did not expect. Carry your camera everywhere. Carry it when you are downtown shopping for shoes. Carry it when you are on vacation.

A few minutes of freedom can reveal a gem you did not expect.

I like to capture real moments of peoples everyday lives.

To me, the best street photos connect viewers with other people.

Street photography is, and always will be, guerilla photographymeaning that there are no rules. You just pick up your camera and go. That said, Id like to define what I personally believe street photography is. As you start your own journey in street photography, it will almost certainly become something different for you.

To me, street photography is about capturing real moments, usually in an urban environment. It focuses on people going about their daily lives and is classically shot with wider angles of view (short focal-length lenses).

This means that, to me, photos of buildings and street signs arent street photography; these images would fall into the category of urban landscapes. Also, I would contend that taking photos from across the street with a 200mm telephoto lens isnt truly street photography.

As we make our way through this book, keep these tenets in mind. We will be talking more about things like equipment selection, approaching subjects, and finding your personal voice as a street photographer.

Street musicians in Portland.

Street photography, for me, is also a way of contributing to your city and your community. Street photography has the power to both document the history of your city and bring its citizens together. It has the power to communicate and preserve the story of a place.

In my hometown of Portland, Oregon, we are experiencing two huge problems that I feel compelled to face as a street photographer. The first is rapid growth and change that threaten to destroy what made Portland hip and weird in the first place. The second is the vast influx of homeless people, due to the nice nature of this communityand the local homeless rates created by rising rents and housing costs.

Portland Outdoor Store.

For those of us who grew up in the area and saw Portland in the 80s and 90s, our favorite things are disappearing. One of my favorite buildings in Portland is the Portland Outdoor Store. They are chugging along as a businessbut as the large edifices of REI, North Face, and Columbia fill Portland, I wonder how long this building will exist. So this image