Street photography
[2][3] The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.
Art dealing with the life of the street, whether within views of cityscapes, or as the dominant motif, appears in the West in the canon of the Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
In 1838 or 1839 the first photograph of figures in the street was recorded by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in one of a pair of daguerreotype views taken from his studio window of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris.
The second, made at the height of the day, shows an unpopulated stretch of street, while the other was taken at about 8:00 am, and as Beaumont Newhall reports, "The Boulevard, so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages was perfectly solitary, except an individual who was having his boots brushed.
[6] Photographer John Thomson, a Scotsman working with journalist and social activist Adolphe Smith, published Street Life in London in twelve monthly installments starting in February 1877.
[2] Eugene Atget is regarded as a progenitor, not because he was the first of his kind, but as a result of the popularisation in the late 1920s of his record of Parisian streets by Berenice Abbott, who was inspired to undertake a similar documentation of New York City.
Its compactness and bright viewfinder, matched to lenses of quality (changeable on Leicas sold from 1930) helped photographers move through busy streets and capture fleeting moments.
[9] Paul Martin is considered a pioneer,[4][10] making candid unposed photographs of people in London and at the seaside in the late 19th and early 20th century in order to record life.
The chief Mass-Observationists were anthropologist Tom Harrisson in Bolton and poet Charles Madge in London, and their first report was produced as the book "May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by over two hundred observers"[12][page needed] The post-war French Humanist School photographers found their subjects on the street or in the bistro.
They worked primarily in black‐and‐white in available light with the popular small cameras of the day, discovering what the writer Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) called the "fantastique social de la rue" (social fantastic of the street)[13][14] and their style of image-making rendered romantic and poetic the way of life of ordinary European people, particularly in Paris.
[19] Walker Evans[20] worked from 1938 to 1941 on a series in the New York City Subway in order to practice a pure 'record method' of photography; candid portraits of people who would unconsciously come 'into range before an impersonal fixed recording machine during a certain time period'.
[21] The recording machine was 'a hidden camera',[22] a 35 mm Contax concealed beneath his coat, that was 'strapped to the chest and connected to a long wire strung down the right sleeve'.
[23] However, his work had little contemporary impact as due to Evans' sensitivities about the originality of his project and the privacy of his subjects, it was not published until 1966, in the book Many Are Called,[24] with an introduction written by James Agee in 1940.
Robert Frank's 1958 book, The Americans, was significant; raw and often out of focus,[31] Frank's images questioned mainstream photography of the time, "challenged all the formal rules laid down by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans" and "flew in the face of the wholesome pictorialism and heartfelt photojournalism of American magazines like LIFE and Time".
[33] Frank's work thus epitomises the subjectivity of postwar American photography,[29] as John Szarkowski prominently argued; "Minor White's magazine Aperture and Robert Frank's book The Americans were characteristic of the new work of their time in the sense that they were both uncompromisingly committed to a highly personal vision of the world".
[34] His claim for subjectivism is widely accepted, resulting more recently in Patricia Vettel-Becker's perspective[35] on postwar street photography as highly masculine and centred on the male body, and Lili Corbus Benzer positioning Robert Frank's book as negatively prioritising 'personal vision' over social activism.
[31] Szarkowski's recognition of Frank's subjectivity led him to promote more street photography in America, such as his curation of the 1967 New Documents exhibition featuring Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand or of Mark Cohen's work in 1973.
"[41] Returning to the UK in 1965 from the US where he had met Winogrand and adopted street photography, Tony Ray-Jones turned a wry eye on often surreal groupings of British people on their holidays or participating in festivals.
The acerbic comic vein of Ray-Jones' high-contrast monochromes, which before his premature death were popularized by Creative Camera (for which he conducted an interview with Brassaï),[42] is mined more recently by Martin Parr in hyper-saturated colour.
Street photography is a vast genre that can be defined in many ways, but it is often characterized by the spontaneous capturing of an unrepeatable, fleeting moment, often of the everyday going-ons of strangers.
Conversely, street photography is reactive and disinterested by nature[47] and motivated by curiosity or creative inquiry,[48] allowing it to deliver a relatively neutral depiction of the world that mirrors society, "unmanipulated" and with usually unaware subjects.
In South Korea, taking pictures of women without their consent, even in public, is considered to be criminal sexual assault, punishable by a fine of up to 10 million won and up to 5 years imprisonment.
[61] The United Kingdom has enacted domestic law in accordance with the Human Rights Act, which limits the publication of certain photographs in the context of the news media.
[citation needed] There are however nuances to these broad principles, and even where photography is restricted as a condition of entry, the landowner's remedies for a breach will usually be limited to asking the photographer to leave the premises.
[66] However, the Court of Appeals for the State of New York upheld the Nussenzweig decision solely on the basis of the statute of limitations expiring and did not address the free speech and First Amendment arguments.
