Street Photography: Seeking a Definition (7/21/08)

The Surreal Theatrical

“In photography there is a new kind of plasticity, the product of instantaneous lines made by movements of the subject. We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.”

*Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment

Walking the streets with a camera is an attractive sport with a long rich history that defies easy categorization. In his essay Private Lives in Public Places: The Ethics of Street Photography, A.D. Coleman traces the history of the genre back to it’s earliest incarnations, when the intent of practitioners such as Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis and Eugene Atget was “primarily informational and representational.” Coleman reminds us that street photographers have gradually “expanded the street as subject, transforming it from a reportorially oriented locus of social concern to the proscenium for a surreal theatrical centered around cultural symbols.” As the 20th Century progressed, “more and more photographers took to the streets with concerns that were not those of the reporter but rather those of the novelist and poet—a search for resonant contrasts, rich metaphors, and found dramatic scenarios.” Coleman adds the names Arbus, Steiglitz, Jacque-Henri Latrigue, Berenice Abbott and others to the roll call of photographers who have at one time or another chosen the streets (re: public space) as their annex. 

The direct confrontation typical of the environmental portrait sacrifices the candid moment to allow the subjects to comport themselves.

During frequent visits to Broadway St., the biggest challenge has been identifying a style of photography that will help forge a narrative characterized by a level of visual consistency. Yet the history of street photography encompasses many styles. While focusing on the people, the urban decay, and the cultural iconography that represents both the past and the present, I find myself drawing on a variety of influences. A more definitive way to express this would be to say that for me to show the many aspects of life on Broadway the way I hope to, no one style is sufficient– I have to employ them all.

Static v. Lyrical: Two sides of the same street 

In 1981, Joel Meyerowitz offered a definition of street photography as “central to the issue of photography . . . purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in with the history of painting and other art forms.” My position is that while street photography is essentially and most famously an elastic, spontaneous art form, it has incorporated– in very important and successful fashion– other genres, most notably environmental portraiture, but also the static imagery of landscape and still life. Ultimately Meyerowitz is correct—street photography is central to the medium’s potential, encouraging and accepting literal, abstract and surreal interpretations of reality. 

Frontally composed scenes like this one draw on the influence of Walker Evans, who in turn has been been compared to Edward Hopper.

In the introductory essay to Helen Levitt’s A Way of Seeing, a gritty yet sentimental paean to 1940’s New York street life, James Agee drew an important distinction between what he called lyrical and static styles of photography. Photographs characterized as static are “the richest in meditativeness, in mentality, in attentiveness to the wonder of material and objects . . .” This approach is well-suited for the Parisian shop fronts of Atget and Brassai, the posed, frontal portraiture of Arbus and Sanders, or the contemplative churches, weathered signage and iconography of Walker Evans. On Broadway there are places where signs, paint and fencing from succeeding eras exist as though layers of some urban anthropological study. While these scenarios make a fine backdrop for the human activity considered a hallmark of rapid-fire street photography, they are, to the discerning and appreciative eye interesting enough to be perceived on their own as examples of what Agee called the “cruel radiance of what is.” (FAMOUS MEN 11) Andrei Codrescu, in his essay for Evans’ book Signs proposed that “This is perhaps one of the unintended ironies of photography: the ephemeral and the enduring are indiscriminately preserved on film.” 

The "lyrical" approach to street photography tends to be more volatile, emphasizing ironic juxtapositions and peak moments.

Conversely, Agee describes the “volatile” work of photographers such as Levitt and Cartier-Bresson (with whom she apprenticed) as “richest in emotion.” While both kinds of photography, Agee allows, are at their best poetic, the static work “has a kind of Homeric or Tolstoyan nobility . . . whereas the best of the volatile work is nearly always lyrical.” The lyrical approach is best suited to capture the hustle and bustle of street life, with its fleeting, ironic or coincidental juxtapositions, and the ebb and flow of human dramas, whether momentous or banal. Agee contends that this “lyrical work is the simplest and most direct way of seeing the everyday world, the most nearly related to the elastic, casual, and subjective way in which we ordinarily look around us . . . as close to the pure spontaneity of true folk art as the artist, aware of himself as such, can come.”  He lauds (correctly in my opinion) Levitt’s best images as a “gentle and wholly unpretentious . . . major poetic work.” Levitt was able to recognize and capture on film moments of interaction between children at play, or adults in conversation that seem entirely natural. Robert Frank would come along a decade later and photograph the off-moments in American life with a dark lyricism that inspired Jack Kerouac’s prosaic notion that “he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” (9) To many though, the ultimate street photographer was Garry Winogrand, an obsessive artist, revolutionary in his use of the wide-angle lens and tilted horizons in order to depict street life as an environmental as well as human experience. His book The Man in the Crowd is a testament to the art of the stolen moment.