street photography

street photography, a genre of photography that records everyday life in a public place. The very publicness of the setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge. Street photographers do not necessarily have a social purpose in mind, but they prefer to isolate and capture moments which might otherwise go unnoticed.

Beginnings

Numerous photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, and William Eggleston, took photos on the street but did not consider themselves street photographers. Stieglitz, for example, photographed the streets of New York City and Paris at the turn of the 20th century during inclement weather, the effects of which were captured in his images. Abbott took a different approach: in the 1930s she documented urban architecture from below, emphasizing the contrast of light and dark and the magnitude of the built environment. Eggleston elevated colour photography to a fine art in his large-scale pictures of everyday, common places, people, and things often found in public or on the street. Though he was influenced by many of those who influenced the street photographers of the 1950s and ’60s, he was not chiefly interested in capturing the spirit of the street.

The impulse to visually document people in public began with 19th-century painters such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who worked side by side with photographers attempting to capture the essence of urban life. Some used photographs as an aid to their painting. Painters, sketchers, and photographers alike treated the street as their studio, recording the mundane and the spectacular, the quintessential figures and the bizarre. Artists manipulated their medium as best they could to evoke spontaneity and movement in a static image in two dimensions. Impressionists such as Claude Monet introduced sketchy brushstrokes into their compositions to express movement and change over time. Monet also painted the same subject repeatedly from the same perspective but at different times of day to see how the change in light would affect the subject, something a camera could do quite efficiently. At first the camera was seen as a tool that could replace the artist’s hand, but over time the camera’s unique capacities—its instantaneousness and ability to see more than the human eye (and with better focus)—clearly set a photograph apart from a painting and made photography not an adjunct study but rather a distinct medium valuable in and of itself.

The first images to exemplify street photography were those produced by French photographer Charles Nègre, who used his camera to document architecture as well as shops, labourers, traveling musicians, peddlers, and unusual street types in the 1850s. Because of the comparatively primitive technology available to him and the long exposure time required, he struggled to capture the hustle and bustle of the Paris streets. He experimented with a series of photographic methods, attempting to find one that would allow him to capture movement without a blur, and he found some success with the calotype, patented in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot. The calotype could capture an image in one minute, a stunning efficiency when compared with the 15 to 30 minutes required for a daguerreotype. Some of Nègre’s photographs were staged to evoke action, and some occasionally included accidents—a blur of a figure moving across the composition. Those accidents serve as some of the earliest examples of movement captured in the still image, an expression of the energy of the street.

Eugène Atget, another early street photographer, documented the streets of Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before they were demolished and rebuilt according to the new city plans implemented by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Atget made albumen prints using a large-format view camera that he lugged with him throughout the city. In contrast to Atget, photographer Charles Marville was hired by the city of Paris to create an encyclopaedic document of Haussmann’s urban planning project as it unfolded, thus old and new Paris. While the photographers’ subject was essentially the same, the results were markedly different, demonstrating the impact of the photographer’s intent on the character of the images he produced. Atget’s goal was to document old Paris before it vanished, regardless of what replaced it. Given the fine quality of his photographs and the breadth of material, architects and artists often bought Atget’s prints to use as reference for their own work, though commercial interests were hardly his main motivation. Instead, he was driven to photograph every last remnant of the Paris he loved. The mingled passion and urgency of his mission shine through, resulting in photographs that narrate his own experience of the city, qualities that anticipated street photography of the 20th century. Atget’s photographs were not mere documents or experiments with new technology. They reveal the city through his eyes. His work and fundamental understanding of photography as an art form served as inspiration to generations of photographers that followed.

Photography on the move and the Leica

The next generation of street photographers, though they likely did not refer to themselves as such, was ushered in by the photojournalism of Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. Street photography as its own genre originated as an offshoot of photojournalism. In fact, many early street photographers started out as photojournalists or fashion photographers and often continued to perform those roles for a living while they pursued their art during their off-hours. Kertész was working in Paris beginning in 1925, and by 1928 he was using a Leica, a handheld lightweight camera that offered both mobility and greater anonymity. His street scenes of Paris sometimes captured people at close range in a manner not seen previously, exhibiting his bold risk taking and strong intuition about the camera’s capabilities. Though using a medium and a technology that were still in their infancy, Kertész mastered the ability to capture spontaneous activity without sacrificing thoughtful composition. Early in his career, he associated with abstract, Surrealist, and Constructivist artists, especially Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose abstract, geometric canvases likely had a significant impact on Kertész’s measured approach to composition.

In the 1930s Hungarian photographer Brassaï (born Gyula Halász), began to gain a reputation for his night photographs, using a technique he learned from Kertész while they were both living and working in Paris. Unlike his peers, Brassaï used a larger-format Voigtländer camera with a longer exposure time, forcing him to be more calculated and thoughtful in his practice than he might have been if using a Leica. (It is thought that he may not have been able to afford a Leica at that time, but he did, however, use one in the late 1950s to take colour photographs.) Brassaï’s photographs of the Paris underworld illuminated by artificial light were a revelation, and the compilation of the series that he published, Paris After Dark (1933), was a major success.

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, an admirer of Kertész, is often credited with bridging art and documentary photography. Cartier-Bresson was a champion of the Leica camera and one of the first photographers to maximize its capabilities. The Leica allowed the photographer to interact with the surroundings and to capture moments as they happened. Its relatively small size also helped the photographer fade into the background, which was Cartier-Bresson’s preferred approach. While discussing his work, Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase “the decisive moment,” which resonates particularly well with the street photographer’s aim: taking advantage of that split second in which the elements of a photograph come together with clarity. It is because of this fundamental understanding of the art of picture taking that he is often credited with rediscovering the medium all over again roughly a century since its invention. He took photographs for more than a half century and influenced generations of photographers to trust their eye and intuition in the moment.

In the United States just before World War II, several photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott, were starting their careers and beginning to more clearly define the potential of photography as it would be practiced in full force a decade later. It was during that period that street photography really began to take form as a unique subgenre of documentary photography. During the Great Depression, photography was becoming ever more present in books, newspapers, and magazines as well as in gallery and museum exhibitions. Evans, Lange, and Abbott, among many others, were making sense of contemporary circumstances, not only the economic struggle but also modernization and the growth of cities and industry. With advanced photographic technology, they took to the streets in cities, towns, and rural areas across the country to document the people and places that encapsulated the American experience.