Some thoughts about street photography and the everyday

Abstract

So much has already been written about street photography that one tends to forget that there is no definite and absolute definition of the topic. Rather, it has become a generalized term to define both the subject (the street, the people in the street, the shops, the neighbourhood and urban photography in general) and the activity of the photographer, acting either as a social documentarist or a free-roaming spirit projecting his/her own artistic inclinations on any movement in the street that stimulates his/her associative mind. In an earlier period the street provided a gallery of social types that were recorded and classified with large-format cameras. Later, it was precisely the use of the smaller, hand-held cameras that dictated the style of taking photographs on the wing and shooting from the hip to characterize the fortuitous aspects of the street. While the topic has been discussed in historical terms (European versus American photography; pre- and post-world war photography; humanistic vision versus a formalized modem photography), the most banal subject of the street has rarely been discussed as a theoretical construct — by this I mean the pedestrian who represents the transient street phenomena.