Anyone who’s ever seen my photography probably knows that I strongly prefer color to black and white. Maria and I have written on the differences before, so I won’t repeat those arguments here in total. I realize that many people think true photography is black and white, but suffice it to say, you’re wrong. 😉…
This is an extension of a post I published on my photography blog, FirewingPhotography.com, regarding the photo below and the idea of truth in street photography. This is a simple shot of two people sitting in an old Citroën in Lido, Venice, Italy in late September 2016. It’s approaching sunset, the sky is filled with…
“Help Me, I’m Walking”
Yesterday, 22 August 2016, marked the 108th anniversary of famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s birth. Although many worship the man as the founder of street photographer (I am not one of them) and while others are less enamored, I must recognize the effect of his work in pushing for composition in street photographer. He…
“There is no story. It’s just a question of shapes and light,” Gruyaert once said. His photos are of vivid, perhap exaggerated colors, light, shapes. They are living still lifes, photos of human-centered shapes doing the mundane. They aren’t meant to tell a narrative; they are simply meant to be beautiful. “It’s purely intuition. There’s…
Sleeping Passengers, Greyhound Bus Terminal, New York City, 1947, Esther Bubley, American (1921 – 1998) Esther Bubley was an American documentary (street) photographer who specialized in photos of ordinary people, taken in an intimate, expressive manner. She spent much of her career in New York City and Washington, DC, and is, among other things,…
Young woman in a car, Vivian Maier, Chicago, Illinois, US, August 16, 1956
I’m finding the futility of life oddly poetic today, given the most recent acts of violence in Dallas. Carved into the hard grain of reality is a word that people seldom know how to pronounce: accountability. Whether we are directly affected by events or not is moot. We are all in some way accountable because…
I’m a street photographer at my core, so what do flowers have to do with shooting street, you might ask? For me the definition between a street photographer and a photographer are marginal, and so it becomes more a question of shooting technique than it is about style or genre. Life is unfolding and happening…
Robert Frank (Switzerland / USA) – 1924 to Present I come to profile Robert Frank, not to praise him. With apologies to Shakespeare, that subtle but important distinction is one the reader needs to understand. To this point, with the exception of some shooters whose contributions to street photography have been exaggerated (e.g. Henri Cartier-Bresson),…
The Artists' Sanctum 