A note on street photography, which emerges from my experience of photographing on the streets of Tokyo in Japan and looking at Meg Hewitt’s fascinating book Tokyo is Yours. The latter stand out in a photography world dominated by Facebook and Instagram, the primary online sharing platforms for photographers today, with their infinite supply of images that passes before us on our screens to disappears, be quickly forgotten, with more content appearing. Only the last image matters. All else is forgotten.
Street photography has simple roots: take a camera, walk around the city, see stuff, photograph it. People have been doing that since photography began there is written history (an Euro-American one); a canon (eg., Charles Traub, Sylvia Plachy, Daido Moriyama, Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel, Elliott Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz etc); and a current ethos of outsiders and misfits with its sense of alienation, isolation, and voyeurism, which it is held is best conveyed from an outsider’s perspective. Though currently undergoing a resurgence in contemporary photography, with its strong online street photo community with its own collective/website (and its In-Public Flickr page and online exhibitions), street photography is seen as outmoded and old fashioned by the art institution.
I am engaged in a long term, low key street photography project with its plain material based on walking Adelaide in South Australia. So my photography is a part of the street photography tradition in Australia:
However, the problem I have with the self-understanding of street photography is the over-reaching or imperial sense of itself. Thus Nick Turpin, who established In-Public, the first international collective of street photographers, observed that street photography doesn’t need defining because “it is, in fact, just photography in it simplest form, so much so that it is all the other forms of photography that need defining to separate them from that basic urge to respond to a scene with a camera that is .… Street Photography. It is the Prime Mover, the evolutionary inheritance of all photography.” It is overreach as street photography has generally been understood in positivist terms as a transparent mirror of life that shows how things are in reality.
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