WHAT IS STREET PHOTOGRAPHY?:

Street photography, sometimes called candid photography is the conduction of photography, where photographers capture natural images, unmediated encounters with strangers on the street.

MOOD-BOARD: 

This is a collage of photos which all involve the use of street photography. TheyAround twenty years ago, street photography started to really sit up and get noticed. It was, of course, in the late 90’s that the first wave of consumer-focused digital cameras arrived – surely not a coincidence. Like the invention of the “Leica format” film (35mm), the digital camera, complete with its increased mobility, inspired a whole new generation of street shooters.

it is usually accepted that Eugene Atget is the rightful father of the street photography genre. Atget worked the streets of Paris beginning in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s. He was really the one to establish the street as a meaningful location for photography. Interestingly, his photography mainly consisted of non-human subjects. So there you go, the father of street photography made street photographs without people. So why is it so hard (and even discouraged) to do so today? A quote from Susan Sontag’s wonderful book, On Photography, will help us better understand. “Photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision.” In other words, pictures of parks, store windows, and other non-human street subjects became too familiar to us, too common to disrupt our way of seeing in an artistic way. Of course, we are now in danger of having the street photograph of a person fall to the same fate.