Dave wrote...
<<<<Street photography is to a great degree voyeuristic for the viewer as well as the photographer.>>>>
It is worth noting that a lot of street photography is interactive, in that the subject is well aware of the photographer. While most people are understandably shy about confronting strangers on the street and photographing them, many of the great street shots were made that way. Look at work by Klein, Bruce Gilden, Winogrand, Friedlander, Bresson, Frank, Faurer, Mermelstein and many others.
>>>. It's perfectly legitimate to fabricate a scene for a commercial assignment. But don't pretend it's a decisive moment.>>>>
Most street photography is not about decisive moments, mainly because few people have that kind of reflexes. It is about the in-between moments, like Dave's "Lub" image. Some ad guys, like the famous street photographer Joel Meyerowitz, when he was shooting cigarette commercials, did grab decisive moments out of set-ups. What he would do was individually tell all the models conflicting instructions, creating spontaneity within a structured situation, and he would shoot whatever happened, exactly as a steet shooter would. For this, he was considered one of the great commercial successes of his day. There are exceptions to these broad characterizations.
Robert adds ---
>I don't know...
>I just don't want to call him a fraud if all he did was keep his mouth >shut. I believe the fun of street photographs is to enjoy them as >evocatively mysterious documents that allow the viewer his or her >own interpretation. I think it has been proven time and time again >that it is generally best for photographers to keep their pieholes >zipped.
I have a hard time assuming the moral authority to rule on Doisneau, to excommunicate him from street photography, declare him a fraud, etc. All I know is that every workday, thousands of "creatifs" huddle at corner offices all over the world to stage set-up photographs. Each makes per year more than Doisneau made in his first decade as a pro. Some have unimaginably large budgets for the shot, much more than Doisneau made in his lifetime, that enable them to buy extremely talented people to execute the shot. Every day, many artists spacewalk the white vacuum of their tables, trying to generate ideas as well. There are only a handful of these shots that have lingered in the public imagination, very, very few over half a century, generation after generation.
Doisneau, making do with what today is less than what you give your teenager a week for an allowance, outdid most of them. Think of that while you are casting stones.
>>r <--- best neither seen nor heard... like a good little street photographer. >>
Geez, man, you stole my arrow....
--- Luis
