Thanks for your comments that I welcome and find very instructive. Here is a brief and succint description of Street Photography by Nick Purtin a Professional Photographer.
I find Street Work most challanging and difficult but also rewarding when I manage to get what I consider to be a good shot.
You are of course right in saying that we all have different styles and tastes in this wonderful world of photography.
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Over the last few decades the phrase 'Street Photography' has come to mean a great deal more than simply making exposures in a public place. Photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Joel Meyerowitz have forced a redefinition of the phrase that has many new implications.
Primarily Street Photography is not reportage, it is not a series of images displaying, together, the different facets of a subject or issue. For the Street Photographer there is no specific subject matter and only the issue of 'life' in general, he does not leave the house in the morning with an agenda and he doesn't visualise his photographs in advance of taking them. Street Photography is about seeing and reacting, almost by-passing thought altogether.
For many Street Photographers the process does not need 'unpacking', It is, for them, a simple 'Zen' like experience, they know what it feels like to take a great shot in the same way that the archer knows he has hit the bullseye before the arrow has fully left the bow. As an archer and Street Photographer myself, I can testify that, in either discipline, if I think about the shot too hard, it is gone.
If I were pushed to analyse further the characteristics of contemporary Street Photography it would have to include the following:
Firstly, a massive emphasis on the careful selection of those elements to include and exclude from the composition and an overwhelming obsession with the moment selected to make the exposure. These two decisions may at first seem obvious and universal to all kinds of photography, but it is with these two tools alone that the Street Photographer finds or creates the meaning in his images. He has no props or lighting, no time for selecting and changing lenses or filters, he has a split second to recognise and react to a happening.
Secondly, a high degree of empathy with the subject matter, Street Photographers often report a loss of 'self' when carefully watching the behavior of others, such is their emotional involvement.
Thirdly, many Street Photographers seem to be preoccupied with scenes that trigger an immediate emotional response, especially humour or a fascination with ambiguous or surreal happenings. A series of street photographs may show a 'crazy' world, perhaps 'dreamlike'. This is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Street Photography, the fact that these 'crazy', 'unreal' images were all made in the most 'everyday' and 'real' location, the street. It was this paradox that fascinated me and kept me shooting in the 'everyday' streets of London when many of my colleagues were traveling to the worlds famines and war zones in search of exciting subject matter. Friends that I met for lunch would, just be back from the 'war in Bosnia' and I would declare proudly that I was just back from the 'sales in Oxford Street'.
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Thanks once again, Duke for your feedback that I appreciate.
Datta:
I don't comment alot on your images, and looking at this one, I think I've figured out why.
We obviously have different styles of shooting. For whatever reason, I feel a need for a more "structured" photograph. This one is more structured (to me), and drew my attention.
You have more of a "street shooting" style, and that is something that usually bewilders me- sometimes I look at the shot and wonder "why?" What is it that drew him to take that particular scene?
But that's the beauty of the hobby- there are an unlimited number of subjects, and some of them will appeal to some of us, but not to all of us. But just because it doesn't neccesarily ring my bell, it doesn't mean that it doesn't ring someone else's.
I'm not really sure why I felt the need to say this, other than the fact that there are a limited number of us that put up pictures, and the fact that I rarely comment on yours is obvious to me if no one else.
I admire your work, and if anything, you and Vince have gotten me to start taking some "street candid" type of stuff- something I never would have considered taking before.
That's about it.
Enough soul-bearing for the moment.
