Street photography



Street photography (also sometimes called candid photography) is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment.

Quotes

 * The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.
 * Robert Doisneau, as quotes in: Gerald D. Hurley, Angus McDougall, Visual Impact in Print: How to Make Pictures Communicate: a Guide for the Photographer, the Editor, the Designer. 1971. p. 131.


 * Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it.
 * Thomas Leuthard, Collecting Souls… What Street Photography means to me. e-book, 2013. p. 95


 * Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them. Gazing on other people's reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its perspective is universal. In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. 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. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque"
 * Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1973-1977. p. 48 (2011 edition)


 * Paris, that great but compact cosmopolitan and imperial city, has a strong claim to be considered the cradle of street photography. The city helped form this genre of photography and, equally, photography contributed to the formation of the city, as Parisians saw first their buildings and then themselves reflected in the many photographic photographic portraits constructed in magazines and books.
 * Julian Stallabrass, Paris Pictured, 2002.; as cited in: Clive Scott, Street Photography: From Brassai to Cartier-Bresson. Routledge, 2020. p. 1


 * Eggleston was a man of his time, the 1960s. In the 1960s, street photography was at its zenith, and Pop Art dominated painting and sculpture. Eggleston fused elements of both street photography and Pop Art into his oeuvre. Like Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Stephen Shore, Eggleston shot from the hip, blending the new apolitical snapshot aesthetic with the older and more traditional stylings of Cartier-Bresson.
 * University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston. 2019. ‎Ann J. Abadie, p. 176.