Street photography

Street photography is casual, opportunistic, voyeuristic and low-fi – it aims to capture the urban experience of anomie, speed, distraction, it’s about people but without their portraits – they become types.

I am not a street photographer, they are (I guess) tougher, more determined, but in the city with a modern camera, anyone can snap moments that are incongruous, weird, humorous, touching. Henri Cartier-Bresson thought that each scene had ‘Images a la Sauvette’ a ‘decisive moment’. Some do, some don’t.

Diane Arbus began as a fashion photographer (for Vogue and such like) but became famous for her direct portraits of outsiders. She exhibited Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander in the 1967 exhibition entitled New Documents at MoMA, as documentary photographers of the street. It’s not the sort of thing you would do in my village.  Some work is respectful and some seems to exploit their subjects.

And the animals are different too: