What is Street Photography?

Broadly, Street Photography is a documentary form of Photography produced candidly in the public realm without staging or manipulation.

But Street Photography is far more nuanced than this factual description implies, there is a tradition and a heritage that has built up around Street Photography since photographers first started recording life in public places and its development is closely aligned to the development of photography as a medium and to technology in general. For many the phrase itself is problematic, coined by some unknown commentator decades ago it serves us poorly in describing the actual practice of making a photographic record of life in public places that doesn’t just include the street. In 2017 Nick Turpin suggested the phrase Candid Public Photography as a broad inclusive description that more accurately contained the practice.

Candid (Adjective) From the Latin, candidus, pure, impromptu, unposed, unrehearsed.

Public (Adjective) From the Latin, publicus, from populus, the people. Able to be seen or known by everyone, open to general view.

Photograph (Verb) From the Greek, phõtos, light, and graphein, to draw, together meaning ‘drawing with light’.

Using the simplest of equipment, Street Photography emphasises the unique vision of the photographer in observing everyday life, each Street Photograph affords us a glimpse into the mind of the photographer, their cleverness, their wit, their sense of order, their cultural and social understandings, their influences and visual sensibilities.

Whilst all acknowledge that a photograph is a new object viewed out of context, most also recognise that there remains a strong connection between a photograph and the scene or happening it shows. Being unstaged and unmanipulated Street Photographs leverage their status as documents to show us evidence of extraordinaryness in real life.

The definition of Street Photography is not fixed however, it is something constantly moving and debated by the current generation of image makers in response to new technologies like the cameraphone or social developments like image sharing platforms such as Instagram. Some argue that there should be no rules whilst others believe that if everything is Street Photography then in fact nothing is.

iN-PUBLiC sees the Street Photographer as an observer not a director who uses the rectangle and the shutter button to make pictures as opposed to a computer.