Street Photography

I caught the BBC documentary on Vivian Maier a few weeks ago. For those who missed it, Maier was an American amateur street photographer, born in New York but raised in France. Her work was never published, she never intended it to be seen and it has only recently been (re)discovered.

It's a fine programme, probably long gone from iplayer given the time it's taken me to commit these thoughts to the blog, equally fascinating as a study of the woman as it is for the photographic content.

Given that I work in the picture industry I genuinely have very little interest in photography as an art form. I've always felt this was an advantage in my professional life as I've often worked for companies owned/run by photographers, most of whom have needed the balance a non-photographer brings to the business.

But I do enjoy street photography. I suspect the lapsed historian in me responds to the pictures as socio-historic documents rather than works of art. It's when the style begins to usurp the content that I start to lose interest.

There's a cocktail party statistic doing the rounds these days that runs along the lines of there have been more photographs created in the last year than in the whole of human history up to that point. Or something like that. Basically, a lot of pictures are currently being taken. But to what end?

I've always been baffled by people taking pictures at major public events - sporting occasions, concerts etc. There seems to be a modern imperative to capture the occasion in an image. But all you're actually capturing is the fact that you were there. If you want a photographic record of the event, get a print from one of the professionals who was there. All you're doing in raising your camera/phone/tablet to your eye is making yourself absent from the moment you're trying to record. Live the moment, don't photograph it.