Street

Street Photography

Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and other settings.

View my favourite Street Photography Pictures:

Combining geometry, composition and the "decisive moment".

" Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing)." - Henri Cartier-Bresson

As a trained painter, Cartier-Bresson - the modern father of street photography - developed a natural eye for framing and composition. This in combination with his skills in tracking down, hunting, waiting and then snapping in the right moment created some amazing photographs.

In the picture above, the strict formal geometry of an outside staircase that is humanised by the blurred figure of a cyclist racing past on the street below (Hyères, France, 1932). Cartier-Bresson saw the staircase, realised its photographic potential, and then sat and waited for some sort of human element to intrude and complete the shot.

There are multiple shots of the same scene, which show how Cartier-Bresson's technique could bring an image together, creating what he called a "coincidence of line". It is the way his eye structured the surface of an image. In his words: "To take a photograph means to recognise – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second– both the fact itself and the rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms that give it meaning."

Watch "Impassioned Eye" with Henri Cartier Bresson from 2003:

"Chicago nanny Vivian Maier died in 2009, leaving behind 100,000 negatives that no one but she had ever seen. Her work was discovered by chance, and now the photographs she took on her days off are being hailed as 'ranking up there' with the best in 20th-century street photography."
Hermione Hoby, the Guardian

The work of Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny whose extraordinary archive of photography was discovered at a junk auction in 2010 was just on display in London.  An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Maier travelled between Europe and the United States before returning to New York City in 1951. Having chosen up photography just two years earlier, she combed the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. In 1956 Maier left the East Coast for Chicago, where she would spend for the most part of the rest of her life working as a nanny. In her leisure time, Maier took photographs in the streets. Continuing her craft into the late 1990′s, she left behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives.