I’ve not watched all the 16 films that are listed in 16 Photography Documentaries every Street Photographer should watch on the Street View Photography site, though there are some that I have seen. Most of the 16 can be found on YouTube, although a few are only available on DVD.
Perhaps I’ll find myself some spare time over Christmas to watch some of the others, although I usually keep pretty busy, and I find it hard to just sit and watch, especially for the longer films. Daido Moriyama: Near Equal is 1hr 24 minutes, and so far I’ve just dipped into it at a few points, so I can’t tell you if it is worth watching as a whole. Picking up his ‘Shinjuku 19XX-20-XX‘ from my bookshelves and looking through a few pages is rather more satisfying if I only have a few minutes to spare. But if you don’t have the book (or others with his work – and there are some available more cheaply), YouTube is considerably cheaper.
And while film is seldom a good medium for looking at photography, it can be good at talking about it, and the film features the photographer and a number of other people (fortunately with subtitles for people like me whose Japanese is non-existent.)
I’ve never considered myself a ‘street photographer’, a term which always seems to me to lack any real meaning, though usually I work on the streets, and certainly see my own work as being a part of that great body of photography that was celebrated in ‘Bystander: A History of Street Photography‘, a book that annexed at least half the history of photography to its presumed genre (as you can appreciate from this speed-reading video.) I don’t think any of those included in the original publication in 1994 – Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Lartigue, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and more – called themselves street photographers either.
I don’t have the Eggleston DVD mentioned in this feature. but I did put another one on my Christmas list a couple of years ago, William Eggleston Photographer, a Reiner Holzemer film (extended trailer here) made in cooperation with the William Eggleston Trust, and I might watch that again. And since people never know what to get me for Christmas, I might just search for a few more films I could add to put on a list for this year.
Film week rather than night with that list!
Thanks for the link.
Luckily I have the Contacts series on DVD and that is good for dipping into.
One not on the list, not even by the elastic definition of “Bystander”, is Don McCullin and I just finished watching the taped (still use that term) BBC film on the Imagine series. That was an emotional and difficult watch and not currently on i-player.
On p207 of my copy:
Under these conditions – combat conditions – Don McCullin and Raymond Depardon are street photographers of a sort.
Few escape its reach. Put a foot on a pavement ever and you are in.
:-)
Well found indeed.