Paul Martin is considered a pioneer, making candid unposed photographs of people in London and at the seaside in the late 19th and early 20th century in order to record life. Twentieth-century practitioners United Kingdom Its compactness and bright viewfinder, matched to lenses of quality (changeable on Leicas sold from 1930) helped photographers move through busy streets and capture fleeting moments. He did photograph some workers, but people were not his main interest.įirst sold in 1925, the Leica was the first commercially successful camera to use 35 mm film. From the 1890s to the 1920s he mainly photographed its architecture, stairs, gardens, and windows. As the city developed, Atget helped to promote Parisian streets as a worthy subject for photography.
Įugene Atget is regarded as a progenitor, not because he was the first of his kind, but as a result of the popularisation in the late 1920s of his record of Parisian streets by Berenice Abbott, who was inspired to undertake a similar documentation of New York City. Thomson played a key role in making everyday life on the streets a significant subject for the medium. Photographer John Thomson, a Scotsman working with journalist and social activist Adolphe Smith, published Street Life in London in twelve monthly installments starting in February 1877. With the type having been so long established in other media, it followed that photographers would also pursue the subject as soon as technology enabled them.Ĭharles Nègre was the first photographer to attain the technical sophistication required to register people in movement on the street in Paris in 1851. Art dealing with the life of the street, whether within views of cityscapes, or as the dominant motif, appears in the West in the canon of the Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
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Much of what is regarded, stylistically and subjectively, as definitive street photography was made in the era spanning the end of the 19th century through to the late 1970s, a period which saw the emergence of portable cameras that enabled candid photography in public places.ĭepictions of everyday public life form a genre in almost every period of world art, beginning in the pre-historic, Sumerian, Egyptian and early Buddhist art periods. Photographers such as William Eggleston often produce street photography where there are no people in the frame, but their presence is suggested by the subject matter. It can also focus on traces left by humanity that say something about life. However, street photography does not need to exclusively feature people within the frame. The existence of services like Google Street View, recording public space at a massive scale, and the burgeoning trend of self-photography ( selfies), further complicate ethical issues reflected in attitudes to street photography. In this respect the street photographer is similar to social documentary photographers or photojournalists who also work in public places, but with the aim of capturing newsworthy events any of these photographers' images may capture people and property visible within or from public places. This motivation entails having also to navigate or negotiate changing expectations and laws of privacy, security and property.
Street photography can focus on people and their behavior in public, thereby also recording people's history. įraming and timing can be key aspects of the craft with the aim of some street photography being to create images at a decisive or poignant moment. The street photographer can be seen as an extension of the flâneur, an observer of the streets (who was often a writer or artist).
Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque".
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.
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