Defining Street Photography - Recreation Photography _____________________________________________________________________________________
By Siano Reino - http://newyorkknicksjerseys.info/
Most types of photography can be easily defined by their subjects. A wedding photographer takes pictures of weddings. A portrait photographer poses someone and takes their picture. The nature photographer covers a wide area, but it is easy to categorize.
What Is Recreation Photography
Street photography is difficult to define because it can encompass just about any subject. If I were to ask you to name a few famous street photographers, you might pick, Garry Winnograd, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or maybe Robert Frank. But if I asked you to define street photography - that would be more difficult. You might say that street photography is candid pictures of strangers on the street. That might be a good start, but it doesn't really describe street photography. To start with, street photography doesn't need to be done on "the street." And it doesn't need to be pictures of strangers. In fact, it doesn't even need to be pictures of people, though it usually is. Although there are common subjects for street photography, it is not so much about the subject as it is the style of the photograph. I can easily imagine an astronaut orbiting the earth, using a street photography style.
Just as any object or scene can be painted with in a cubist style, just about any subject can be photographed in street-photography style. I say almost any subject, because the one thing that all street photos have in common are human beings, or human artifacts: things that were made by human beings. So what are the characteristics of this style which can be separated from the subjects of the image. The most common and famous property of street-photography is the idea of capturing "the decisive moment." The most well-known street moment may be the blurred image of a man trying to jump a puddle at the railway station by Cartier-Bresson. A moment sooner and you have the guy standing, looking at the large puddle. A moment later, and the man has fallen into the puddle, or cleared it somehow. You don't really know. But capturing the moment, even if it is important, isn't everything.
Suppose that photograph were taken with a long modern lens, and the figure was frozen at 1/8000th of a second in mid-air, and the background and foreground were blurred because the depth-of-field with a long lens is very narrow. Well, it might look very much that moment when a pitcher releases the ball in an important game. The foreground and background are blurred. Even the closest part of the pitching mound is out of focus. Can that be considered a street shot. No. Why not? It's the decisive moment alright - but without context - it isn't street photography. Since we're imagining shots, let's imagine that you are sitting in the dugout with a normal or wide angle lens, and you hear footsteps on top of the dugout. You wonder what is going on, and at the same time you prepare your camera, and the pitcher is taking his wind up in the background, and just as he let's go of the ball, a naked streaker jumps from the top of the dugout onto the field. And you have snapped just
as the figure was in mid-air, and the ball was coming to the plate, and the pitcher was finishing his follow-through. That's a street shot. No street. No buildings. But you have caught two moments, and pretty much everything is in focus, and you can look at the picture and just be amazed. The viewer is as surprised as you were - though you had some idea that something was about to happen. It's that sort of moment, or juxtaposition of ideas, that street photographers are fascinated by. If you had a lot of money, you could dream up this still shot, and rent out the stadium and the team, and recreate this shot exactly as described - but that would not be street photography. And so long as nobody told about how the shot was set up and planned, it would be considered a great street shot. If everyone found out that they were duped, it might still be considered a great photograph - but not a great street shot.
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