Maria and I have considered the question, “What is Street Photography?” for years. We’ve settled on this definition: Street photography documents humans and their behavior, in situations wherein they act spontaneously, generally but not always in urban settings. Street photography is a visual history of contemporary human life, not just of human cities and environs.…
I curate a couple of feeds on Bluesky that collects candid, human-centric street photography (which would be more accurately called candid or spontaneous photography). The first, Candid Street Photos, finds and identifies candid photography from whoever is posting these shots on Bluesky. It doesn’t catch them all, but I do make sure that all the…
Back in my Flickr days, I curated a street photography group called Life, Love Joy & Pain (LLJP). It targeted one of the many street photography subgenres I have identified. A list of some of them are below, along with examples of famous shooters who popularized them. I’ve added some sub-bullets to show how even…
As a child of the 1960s, I am drawn to photos taken during my youth. Colors were primary; cars were large, loud, inefficient, and unapologetic. Gas stations were a way of life. No refilling every two weeks for that lot. You bought gas often and since it was cheap, you liked. Filling stations were like…
There has long been a debate on when photographers should shoot in black and white (bw) versus color. This is particularly true with respect to street photography, since many old shooters have held loud biases against shooting color. Before we debate the merits of their arguments, we need to understand a bit of history. For…
In addition to painting versions of my and my wife’s photos, I’ve begun a series wherein I do an interpretation of photographs taken by renowned street photographers. I don’t usually have a predetermined approach to them. I really just start sketching (or painting without a formal sketch) and seeing where they take me. The results…
And now, after a five-year absence, here we are again as though nothing has happened. In truth, nothing much has. We suspended the series primarily because blogging turned out to be a horrible way of reaching people. Though we get intermittent readers, most of the people who stopped by were other bloggers, doing so, in…
WITHIN this website, on any number of occasions, we have held discussions on the merits of color versus black and white photography. I won’t repeat those here, or even bother to link to them (because I can’t be arsed to look them up). Instead, I will post below some photos from FSA photographer Louise Rosskam,…
As a photographer and editor, I’ve recently become distressed by those few photographers who insist on taking photographs that don’t conform to common photographic practice. That is to say, these frondeurs ignore 180 years of tradition and insist on taking shots that are unique, having little or no banality to speak of. I don’t understand…
The one comment that people always make, when I tell them I’m a street photographer, is, “I don’t think I could ever work up the nerve to photograph people like that.” Often, that statement is followed up with, “Don’t they ever get mad at you?” Since I first started taking candid photos in the street…
The Artists' Sanctum 