James Maher - The Essentials of Street Photography

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge by Dave Beckerman.

M ost types of photography can be easily defined by their subjects. A wedding photographer takes pictures of weddings. A portrait photographer poses someone and takes their picture. The nature photographer covers a wide area, but it is easy to categorize.

Street photography is difficult to define because it can encompass just about any subject.

If I were to ask you to name a few famous street photographers, you might pick Garry Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or maybe Robert Frank. But if I asked you to define street photography that would be more difficult. You might say that street photography is candid pictures of strangers on the street. That might be a good start, but it doesnt really describe street photography.

To start with, street photography does not need to be done on the street, and it does not need to be pictures of strangers. In fact, it does not even need to be pictures of people, though it usually is. Although there are common subjects for street photography, it is not so much about the subject as it is about the style of the photograph. I can easily imagine an astronaut orbiting the earth, using a street photography style.

Just as any object or scene can be painted in a cubist style, just about any subject can be photographed in a street photography style. I say almost any subject because the one thing that all street photos have in common are human beings, or human artifacts: things that were made by human beings.

If street photography were a musical form it might be jazz. It might be rock and roll. The style of music would have a measure of improvisation. The moment is not enough. To play by the rules, the shot really does need to be unplanned. It also needs to allow the eye to wander around and make its own conclusions about the meaning of the photograph.

The street photographer is a perpetual tourist. They may never leave their own town, but as they walk around, they can see things that the rest of the world is oblivious to.

The street photographer can best be identified not by what they shoot, but why they shoot. If their purpose is to make a discovery, to find a surprise, to give expression to their own curiosity about people and the things that people construct, then there is a good chance you have run into a street photographer. The best ones are like Zen hunters. I say Zen hunter because you cannot force the unexpected. You can only be open to it.

Looking for that moment is as useless as casting a fishing line and saying, Now I will catch a fish. It does not work that way. You cannot force it, but you can put yourself in a place where there are enough people milling about to increase your odds.

I knew a street photographer who became fascinated by the different ways that people hailed cabs in New York City. For two years, whenever he saw someone hail a cab, he tried to find a new angle, a new way of shooting this most ordinary of urban moments. One day, after years of keeping an eye out for people hailing cabs, he glimpsed a young girl with crutches waiting to get into the cab. This might have been just another shot, but as he got closer to take the shot, he saw an old man with crutches getting out of the cab. You look at the image and think what a stroke of luck to find this coincidence, but he took years of maintaining this obsession to make something from the idea. And other times you just walk out of the house and are greeted with this sort of coincidental image.

The street photographer is the mirror image of the commercial photographer. The commercial photographer sets up the product to be photographed, arranges the lighting, controls as much of the image as he can, and takes the picture. The wedding photographer urges the various families to stand and smile at the camera. The idea of posing subjects is anathema for the street photographer.

The street photographer is often an unwanted guest. They need to develop ninja-like techniques so that they remain unseen in the middle of a crowded street. They may even dress in camouflage. Rather than using a high-powered rifle to pick off wild beasts at a distance, most street photographers prefer to capture strangers at close range. This can be scary for the beginner.

I am sure that many a street photographers dream of a cloak of invisibility. One photographer I knew would dress like a typical tourist in New York and bring a tourist map with him. He might stand near the Empire State building and gawk up at it, all the time taking pictures of the people around him. So here he is, a New York City native for fifty years, play-acting the tourist so that he can blend in with the strangers around him.

There are the formal elements that can be used to define the street photograph: the mysterious decisive moment that is shown in context; the use of juxtaposed elements to form a new synthesis that is unusual, although the juxtaposed elements may be ordinary; the desire to let the scene play without disturbing it; and most of all, the desire to experience and communicate the surprise that the photographer feels in the frame, which is pointed at the world of human beings and their creations.

But as you can see, it is much easier to talk about techniques that street photographers use to achieve their ends then it is to define the style.