Open Mike: Street Photography Day!

Don't forget that August 22, a mere three days from now, is Street Photography Day.

I started Street Photography Day in 2012 under the mistaken impression that somebody else had already started it and I was just joining in. Since then, it has really caught on: hundreds of people have observed it*. It takes place on the birthday of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was born on August 22 in 1908. He would have been 112 this Saturday. He made it most of the way—he died at age 95.

The idea is that on his birthday, every photographer tries to take one good "street" photo. No matter if you're a formal portraitist, a dedicated National Parks landscape photographer, a vlogger, a still-life photographer...try to get out of your house, get out of your comfort zone, get down to the street, and find a picture in the street genre.

This year's theme (of course): the socially distanced street photo. This year, I would say, empty streets are fair game. Usually they wouldn't be, engagement with the denizens of the streets being an essential characteristic of the category.

Don't forget Gordon wrote a book on the subject. Or that Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck has been reprinted.

Paragons
If you think it would be more appropriate to not play the game this year, I understand. An alternative game would be to go find a street photograph you really like, a picture you think is quintessential street.

Here are two of my all-time favorites:

Photo by Eugene Richards

Photo of photo by Martin Parr

The first one by Eugene Richards is Grandmother, Brooklyn, NY, 1993. You can see a larger version and more pictures from the great book Americans We at his website. Some people have claimed this was a setup, but it wasn't—he was just interacting with the people, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. I mean, what else?

Eugene Richards said the following about it: "On this particular day, I had a job at Gleason’s gym in Dumbo. I walked up the street and saw them. I was tired and know I'm going to say can I photograph you when there's a bunch of kids here and they’re going to say no. Then I’m going to feel worse than I already do. So I went right past it. I went up to the subway and thought it was so beautiful. I thought for Christ's sake, turned around and came back down the hill. By that time, the grandmother was on the way to the wading pool. I asked if I could photograph [her] and then the little girl took a bucket of water and threw it at me. We had a good laugh and that was it. I photographed 20 or 30 frames because it was just so cool. Everybody knows what water does, but I never actually thought that it would come out in the picture, but you could see it. It was really hot, it was like 95. Afterwards, I took off my shirt—everything was soaked anyway—and got in the hydrant. It was really nice."

The second one is my illicit snap of Martin Parr's framed print, from a dimly-lit show at the Art Institute of Chicago. The print was big, as I would define big, like two and a half or three feet high. (You weren't supposed to take pictures at the show. I hope there is no Museum detective squad working on cold cases.)

I actually managed to contact Martin Parr directly about it. He confirmed to me that it wasn't actually a "found" or candid photograph, but rather a setup for a commissioned advertising assignment. To most people, that disqualifies it as "street." And rightly so—street is an attitude, not a subject, not a look. But I decided to go ahead and keep liking it anyway. It's a beautiful photograph. If it's fiction, it's fiction of the best sort, meaning that it draws me in to its world and gets me to "suspend disbelief."

Martin Parr is one of the great photographers of his generation (and mine—he's five years older). I haven't gotten to see much of his work, though. I couldn't get used to it at first, decades ago. All that...color, all over everywhere.

Here's a very short interview with Martin Parr that gives you a sense of his opinions, and of how he speaks.

Please hit me
If you dismissed the Parr example as not being of the genre, here's a recent find that stuck with me—which might be a different kind of lie. This was in one of those clickbait collections that are trying to get you to keep paging through them so you'll look at more ads. They're sort of a guilty pleasure with me because I like to scrounge the world for photos. I have no idea if the caption is true or invented post hoc, but it's essential to the picture, and it's perfect.

The explanation was: "This guy was on a trip to Walmart when he noticed that the 'P' at the beginning of the word pharmacy was about to fall off. So, he did what any smart Walmart patron would do. He stood below the P for the next few hours, praying that it would fall and hit him so that he could sue Walmart."

I love this. It's one vision of America in a nutshell, sort of funny and appalling and dubious all in equal measure. Whatever else you might say about us, we are not afraid of showing ourselves in a bad light. It's confidence, of a sort.

Go long
Out here in the country, you can wait quite a long time for a car to go by. I've taken many walks up the hill when I've seen more animals than people. So I'll probably voyage to our local metroplex of 5,500 souls, where heavy traffic means a horse and buggy with ten cars piled up behind it. The streets should be teeming with photo opportunities. Especially on a Saturday!

You're supposed to get up close for street photography, but...COVID. I'll take my long lens.

Mike
(Thanks to Jan Kwarnmark)

*I'm being sarcastic. It hasn't caught on. I'm the only one who ever mentions it. But I'm sticking with it. It'll be famous someday!

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Comments

[Dan Khong]

Please leave the long lens at home and take the 35mm or the 50mm lens. The challenge of Street Photography is about getting up close and snap.

Some cameras do better than others - because their innocence or silliness or quirkiness (like the Leica IIIf) helps. Henri-Cartier-Bresson used a screw mount Leica and never left home without it.

Seems the DSLRs frighten people.

[Long lens because COVID-19.

(And HCB only used screwmount cameras when that's all there was--he used M's after the M3 was introduced.) --Mike]

[Eric Rose]

Ya gotta check out Stan Banos's street stuff. Very good captures of todays condition which can be anywhere from funny to WTF to down right painful.

[Speed]

"I have no idea if the caption is true or invented post hoc ... "

"So, he did what any smart Walmart patron would do. He stood below the P for the next few hours ... "

Why would the man stand for a few hours (HOURS!) when he could have sat under the P in greater comfort to the same end? I call "invented" or at least embellished.

[Jeff]

But today is World Photography Day. Where is your daguerreotype?

[Bob G.]

Love the challenge! Street photo with a “street” caption...

[Kye Wood]

In The Arts, be it theatre, writing or photography, it's been said that the ability to handle rejection is the most important of all of the skills to possess. To be willing and open to expose my most vulnerable ego to rejection is what keeps me from taking street photos.

Which is silly because I'm such a people person. Yes, iPhone photos don't raise an eyebrow or a second glance. But raise a DSLR with a fast lens attached and you can hear the stochato clicking of sphincters. Metaphorically.

[Bear.]

Given Melbourne Oz is under stay at home orders (and a curfew) because of Covid-19, my "street" photo this year may be precisely that- photo from a window of an empty street....

[Stan B.]

Grandmother, Brooklyn, NY is one of the greatest photographs... Ever- forget the classification! It is the magic and wonder of life embedded directly smack unto film. Marveled at it for hours when I first came upon it- still do.

I wish naming a specific time would ensure a good photograph, truth is, when I'm out on the prowl for photos, they rarely come. But when I'm getting a cup of Joe, catching a bus, well... you get the picture- if you're prepared.

[Albert Engeln]

Hi Mike, My name is Albert Engeln I live in south of Spain, and made a collection of street photography around the city I live.
Here is the link:
https://pbase.com/pung/never_the_same_again
Best regards,
Albert

[Roger Bradbury]

In answer to Dan Khong, and to Mike's answer to him, I've been using the rough equivalent to 35mm and 50mm lenses for many of my shots in a project about what people are doing during lockdown.

I quickly realised that setting the zoom to 24mm (about equal to a 36mm lens on full frame) on my 24mm wide sensor meant that whatever width I wanted to get in shot was the same as how far away I needed to be.

I wanted to have a good two metres (the UK's minimum social distance) either side of the subject. So one person with a good two metres each side, meant I was about 4.5 metres away. Two people, 5 metres away.

I also wanted to keep a natural perspective; much longer or much wider lenses would compress or exaggerate distances. So it can be done with close to normal lenses, though they will put an interesting constraint to your shots; never a bad thing.

On my blog so far there are 16 posts and over 130 photos from my Distance Project:
https://www.northbuckswanderer.com/distance-project/#gsc.tab=0

[Aaron J]

My luckiest photo book find was Martin Parr's Thinking of Scotland. A couple of years ago I stumbled on it for $4.74 on Amazon--brand new. Must of been one of those weird Amazon pricing flukes. I love the book, although it's one flaw (one shared by too many photo books) is that some photos span the inner fold. Why, oh why, do photo books do that? Bigger is not better if the photo is interrupted by a crease.

[Kurt Kramer]

Are you inviting your readers to send or post their one best street photograph made on Saturday?

[Patrick Medd]

I must say I always felt like you about Martin Parr’s colour work—too much, too garish. I changed my mind after I discovered his early black and white work from the North of England which is now collected in a book called ‘The Non-Conformists’. The cover picture from that book ‘The Mayor of Todmorden’s Inaugural Banquet’ (https://huxleyparlour.com/works/mayor-of-todmorden-s-inaugural-banquet-calderdale-1976/) is, I think, one of the most perfect photographs I have ever seen. Every character is interesting, different and distressingly human. As it’s taken indoors it perhaps isn’t strictly street photography, but it gets my vote.