One of the things that pains Maria and me is the number of people who are enamored with a single shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson (“Behind the Gare Saint Lazare“). You know the one, the “Defining Moment” shot. But here’s the thing: it’s a shitty photo. It’s underexposed, details are lost because of the lack of…
Read Part 6 or view Index to start at the beginning. Part 7 – The Rule Making Epoch–Siskind to Cartier-Bresson As I stated in Part 4 of this series, there is substantial overlap between the street photography epochs we describe. Rather than being purely sequential time periods, as the word epoch might suggest, they are…
Read Part 5 or view Index to start at the beginning. Part 6 – Brandt to Doisneau Hermann Wilhelm “Bill” Brandt (UK) – 1904 – 1983 Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, known as Bill, was born in Germany just after the turn of the twentieth century. Brandt is widely considered one of the most important British photographers…
Read Part 4 or view Index to start at the beginning. Part 5 – Eisenstaedt to Weegee Alfred Eisenstaedt (Germany, USA) 1898 – 1995 Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German-born American photojournalist and one of the twentieth century’s most prolific photographers. Born in Dirschau, West Prussia, by age 14 Eisenstaedt had taken up photography via his…
Index Part 3 Part 4 – The Transitional Epoch By the time the Foundational Epoch ended, shutterbugs had firmly established photography as an art form. Whether their primary intention was in proving the technology (a la Daguerre), displaying life on the streets (Stieglitz, Atget, Thomson), moving viewers toward social change (Riis, Hine), or simply having…
Part 3 – Chained No More – In which our jaunty photographers learn that street photography wasn’t invented with the Leica and really didn’t change all that much once someone finally invented some fast film. To this point in the history of street photography, which represents the emergence of a second generation of photographers around…
An Introduction to Vivian Maier, and the Phenomenon of the Artist-Photographer. Vivian Maier, born in New York in 1926, a nanny originally of French and Austrian heritage, was, is, in mine and Bill’s opinion possibly the best street photographer in the history of street photography. She has been hailed as one of the greatest talents…
See Track A, Part 1 here: Track A (History of Street Photography) Part 2 Links I wish I could give you the name of a book that laid out all of these photographers in order, but I can’t. The first link may be such a source, but honestly, I haven’t read it. However, here are…
See Track A, Part 1 here: We continue our view of the History of Street Photography with the first of four epochs in street photography, this of the art form’s founding fathers — the Foundational epoch, from 1839 to the start of World War I. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (France) – 1787 – 1851 Photography as an…
As indicated in the Introduction, this is Track A (History of Street Photography). Track B (Art of Composition and the Composition of Art) will start in the near future. You can find a link to the posts already written to date on The Art of Street Photography page in the header above. Part 1 –…
The Artists' Sanctum 