Street photography is a form of candid photography, is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Typically, street photography is about candidly capturing life in public areas. And contrary to its name, street photography does not have to be done on the streets. You can do street photography anywhere.

BRUCE GILDEN

Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York. While studying sociology at Penn State, he saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup in 1968. Influenced by the film, he purchased his first camera and began taking night classes in photography at the School of Visual Arts of New York. Fascinated with people on the street and the idea of visual spontaneity, Gilden turned to a career in photography. His work is characterized by his use of flash photography. He has worked in black and white most of his life, but he began shooting in color and digital when he was introduced to the Leica S camera as part of Magnum’s Postcards From America project. He is renowned for controversially jumping-up at people and taking photos of them while they walk through the streets, minding their own business, which makes for the surprised faces that can often be seen in his photographs .

He has photographed people on the streets of New York, Japan’s yakuza mobsters, homeless people, prostitutes, and members of bike gangs between 1995 and 2000. According to Gilden, he was fascinated by the duality and double lives of the individuals he photographed. He has also photographed rural Ireland and horse racing there, as well as voodoo rituals in Haiti.