A street photograph begins before the camera comes to your eye. You notice an interval between people, a hand resting on a shoulder, or a patch of light that someone is about to enter. The photograph grows from that act of attention. Equipment records the moment; noticing gives you a reason to record it.
I am interested in ordinary life and the small relationships within it. A photograph need not contain an extraordinary event. It needs something worth looking at, held together by the choices you make about timing, position and framing. Those choices are learnable. They also remain worth questioning however long you have been taking pictures.
What belongs in street photography
Street photography usually concerns public life photographed with a responsive, observational approach. A shopping arcade, village market, railway platform or seaside promenade can be as useful as a famous city street. A person may occupy most of the frame, appear as a small figure, or be absent while signs of human activity carry the picture.
Definitions vary. Some photographers reserve the term for unposed pictures of strangers; others include portraits made through conversation. The distinction matters less than honest description. An unposed encounter, a cooperative portrait and a staged scene are different kinds of photograph. Presenting them accurately allows viewers to understand what they are seeing.
A candid picture is unposed. Its subject need not be entirely unaware of the camera. Someone may glance towards you without being directed, and the picture can still be candid. Conversely, asking a person to repeat a gesture produces a directed image even if the result looks spontaneous.
A tradition with many voices
Street photography has no single inventor or approved appearance. Earlier photographers recorded streets under the constraints of their materials and equipment. More portable cameras expanded the possibilities for following public life, while successive generations brought different interests, communities and visual languages to it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's work offers a useful study of the relationship between an event and the arrangement of forms. His book Images à la sauvette appeared in English as The Decisive Moment in 1952. The phrase is often reduced to quick reflexes. Look more carefully and you find attention to geometry, relationships and the instant when separate elements belong together.
Robert Frank invites a different kind of looking: a sequence can accumulate meaning through tensions and recurring details. Garry Winogrand's pictures reward attention to the energy and ambiguity of crowded frames. Elliott Erwitt demonstrates how humour can emerge from a small relationship between otherwise ordinary things. Alex Webb's work shows how colour and several planes of activity can operate together.
Vivian Maier's photographs are useful for studying gesture, reflections and the photographer's position within the scene. Her archive began to surface before her death in 2009, with much wider recognition following. It is inaccurate to say that nobody discovered the work until after she died. More importantly for a learner, the photographs deserve careful looking beyond the familiar story about their discovery.
Diane Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark offer important lessons about portraiture and documentary engagement. William Klein and Bruce Gilden demonstrate approaches very different from quiet observation. Studying a photographer does not require adopting their behaviour or treating their methods as permission to disregard your own responsibilities.
Choose a small number of pictures to examine closely. Ask where the photographer stood, what the edges exclude, where the light falls, and which relationship makes the frame work. Learning the question behind a picture is more useful than reproducing its surface appearance.
Why black and white
Black and white changes the relationships you must solve. Two colours that separate strongly in life may become similar greys. A bright garment can cease to dominate while a pale face, dark doorway or reflected highlight becomes more important. You begin to think about tone, shape, texture and the movement of the eye.
This is a preference and a visual discipline, not a guarantee of seriousness. A weak colour photograph does not become strong simply because its colour is removed. Ask whether the conversion clarifies the picture. Where colour carries essential information, acknowledge what monochrome loses.
You can practise seeing in monochrome with a camera preview, while retaining a colour raw file if your camera supports that workflow. The preview helps you notice tonal relationships in the field. The retained data gives you more choices when making the final conversion.
Look before you hunt
A useful walk begins with a manageable question. Where are people waiting? What happens at the boundary between a shop and the pavement? How does a person occupy a large architectural space? A question gives your attention direction without scripting the answer.
Choose one small area and remain there long enough to understand its rhythm. Notice where people slow down, where they turn, and how light changes their visibility. You do not need to photograph every interesting person. You need to recognise when the person, surroundings and moment form a picture.
Avoid deciding a stranger's life story from their appearance. A lowered head may mean tiredness, concentration, prayer or a shoe being examined. Photographs invite interpretation; they seldom prove private emotions. Keeping that distinction in mind makes both your pictures and their captions more thoughtful.
Assignment and review
Spend the first ten minutes of a short walk without taking a photograph. Identify three recurring actions and one useful place to stand. Then make a small set of pictures exploring a single relationship, such as people and doorways.
Review the set after some distance from the outing. Select three frames and write one factual sentence about each. Explain what is visible before explaining what you imagine. If the picture depends entirely on a story you cannot substantiate, look again at what the frame itself contributes.
Further reading: Magnum's Henri Cartier-Bresson profile and the Vivian Maier archive are linked in the sources at the end of this edition.