{"id":7057,"date":"2017-03-21T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T10:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=7057"},"modified":"2017-03-20T16:01:30","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T16:01:30","slug":"street-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=7057","title":{"rendered":"Street talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Stanworth<\/em> asks Is Street Photography Killing Itself?<\/a>, and gives an excellent summary of some of the reasons why so much of it is boring and pointless, along with many images culled from the web to support his case.\u00a0It’s an article that will probably be reacted to with some forceful comments, particularly from those who either haven’t bothered to read it or who have failed to understand it.<\/p>\n

Personally I’ve never been convinced ‘street photography<\/em>‘ was ever alive. I’ve written a little before about it and my feeling that it is not a real or useful category, something which I think becomes entirely obvious if you read it’s ‘bible’, Westerbeck & Meyerowitz’s ‘Bystander<\/em>‘<\/a>. Fortunately almost none of those whose work is in its pages considered themselves as a ‘street photographer’; they were all taking photographs on or from the streets – as opposed to working in a studio – but they all went on to those streets with particular ideas and stories they were interested and involved in photographing.<\/p>\n

The problem with most so-called ‘street photography’ I see now is simply that it is vacuous. Stanworth uses a lot of examples and explains the point well, and there are a couple of sentences in the middle giving a little advice to those who must be street photographers that I think really the crux:<\/p>\n

“However, just engaging in the subject of photography helps. Learning a little more about yourself helps. Learning about the people and environment around you and your thoughts and reactions to it helps. The sad truth is that most of our effort in photography amounts to nothing.”<\/p>\n

‘Street photography’ in general is, as he said, seen as ‘cool’. It is generally cool in that it is unengaged, using a small ragbag of tricks to produce images as deep as the average street puddle.<\/p>\n

In his final sentences Stanworth again makes his views clear:<\/p>\n

“And here we are back to the supreme importance of relationships, expression and connection. Without these things, both just become repetitive, predictable acts that lose their lustre.”<\/p>\n

For a quite different piece of writing by Stanworth, I’ve also been reading his review of the Fuji X100F<\/a> on his Photofundamentalist blog. It’s very much a photographer’s review rather than the technical tour-de-forces that sites such as DPreview.com offer, and one that complements their work well. \u00a0It makes me think I really ought to\u00a0buy one, though having also read his view on the Ricoh GR I think I might find that more useful – if I can live without an optical viewfinder, though there is a rather expensive external accessory that will fit in the hot shoe.<\/p>\n

His photography <\/a>is also worth a look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Stanworth asks Is Street Photography Killing Itself?, and gives an excellent summary of some of the reasons why so much of it is boring and pointless, along with many images culled from the web to support his case.\u00a0It’s an article that will probably be reacted to with some forceful comments, particularly from those who … Continue reading Street talk<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-issues","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7058,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057\/revisions\/7058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}