Old street photography
10 Iconic Street Photographers | Artsy
Visual Culture
Alina Cohen
Oct 5, 2018 9:39PM
Street photographers remind us that history isn’t just composed of monumental events, celebrities, and politicians, but of people like us. They capture candid shots of individuals partaking in relatable, mundane activities: walking, talking, and gathering. Across race, class, and age, the myriad subjects of street photography offer a comprehensive study of what it’s like to live at a particular moment in time. Fashions and infrastructures change, but at the core of these photographers’ oeuvres is human emotion and ritual. The photographers listed below have documented people—for posterity—at their best, worst, and everywhere in between.
Eugène Atget (1857–1927)
French
Eugène Atget
Pharmacy Interior, Paris, 1910s, 1920s, possibly printed later
Skinner
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Eugène Atget
Versailles, Maison Close, Petite Place, 1921/1930c
Contemporary Works/Vintage Works
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Nostalgia fueled Eugène Atget’s portraits of Paris. In the mid-1800s, Georges-Eugène Haussmann led a campaign to modernize the city. As parks and wide boulevards replaced medieval architecture, Atget decided to preserve his surroundings on film. He documented a pharmacy interior, a bakery, hotels, the Tuileries Gardens, and the Notre-Dame, as well as the people who populated the nearby streets. In his images, Parisians gaze towards the sky to watch an eclipse, work as organ-grinders, stand in shadowed corners, and move like ghosts through a doorway. Atget was, ironically, savoring the past via a newfangled art form—photography was rapidly becoming more popular for commercial, industrial, and artistic purposes.
Atget’s greatest legacy, perhaps, is his influence on other artists. The Surrealists (particularly Man Ray) adored his hazy images; mid-century photographer Berenice Abbott championed his work; and Ansel Adamscalled it “perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.”
Weegee (1899–1968)
Eastern European (from modern-day Ukraine)
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America’s underbelly became Weegee’s greatest subject.
Crime scenes, gawkers, and go-go dancers, captured late at night, define his oeuvre. Often considered a progenitor of tabloid journalism, Weegee (born Arthur Fellig) chased the sordid side of the nightly news. According to Steven Kasher Gallery, he was the “first private citizen to gain access to police radio transmits.” Upon hearing of a new crime on the airwaves, he’d take his equipment to the source of the turmoil and document it for his own audiences. (Weegee also inspired the 2014 film Nightcrawler, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a predatory cameraman.)
InWeegee’s pictures, wide-eyed children gape at a curiosity just outside the frame, a man gets ready for a mugshot, and police surround a fallen body. In his later career, Weegee distorted celebrity portraits—but still, he remained obsessed with spectacle and the grotesque.
Lisette Model (1901–1983)
Austrian
Lisette Model
Coney Island Bather, New York (Reclining), 1939-1941
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Price on request
Lisette Model’s pictures of colorful characters on Coney Island, the Lower East Side, and along the French Riviera preempted the work of her most famous student, Diane Arbus.
Model wasn’t interested in capturing beauty, which she found boring. “But an ugly body can be fascinating,” she once said.
Born in Vienna, Model abandoned a career in music to become a photographer. One of her most famous subjects was a large woman in a black bathing suit. The “Coney Island Bather” crouches at the shoreline, the tide rippling just beneath her. A cross pendant hangs around her neck, and she smiles at someone or something just out of the frame. Joyful, and apparently at total ease with herself, the woman also looks strikingly contemporary: The ocean, her classic swimwear, and beachside happiness never go out of style.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004)
French
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Seville, Spain, 1933
A Gallery for Fine Photography
French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson produced indelible, romantic images of pre- and post-war Europe, as well as portraits of its greatest artists. He contributed to the mythmaking of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and Niki de Saint Phalle as he captured them in their studios.
Yet he offered the same dignified glimpse of children walking Parisian streets and cavorting in Seville. A picnic on the bank of the Marne, shot in 1938 from behind the participants, becomes an ominous look at leisure at the outset of major continental conflict—a picture of privilege and innocence before German occupation. In 1944, Cartier-Bresson also photographed the liberation of Paris. It wasn’t the soldiers or world leaders who intrigued him, though—it was the masses on the streets.
Cartier-Bresson also influenced how photographers see the world. The Decisive Moment,a manual published in 1952, proposes an ideal instant in which all elements in the camera frame become formally perfect; the book’s concept is taught widely in photography programs today.
Vivian Maier (1926–2009)
American
Vivian Maier never set out to be a famous photographer. She worked as a nanny, photographing the streets of Chicago and New York City as a hobby. Her photographs often feature a shadowy voyeurism: In a reflection, she captured street walkers unaware; from behind, she photographed a woman taking a picture of two other women.
Yet Maier also caught small moments of grace, such as a well-heeled man, cigarette between his lips, offering money to a panhandler.
When real-estate developer–turned–artist John Maloof purchased a trove of Maier’s negatives at a Chicago auction in 2007, he embarked on a mission to make her a household name. Maloof’s documentary, Finding Vivian Maier (2013), delved into the life of the woman herself, bringing the artist out of her own shadows. Many of her biographical details are still unknown—fitting, perhaps, for a woman who made such mysterious, haunting images.
Garry Winogrand (1928–1984)
American
Garry Winogrand
World's Fair, New York City, 1964
Jackson Fine Art
Garry Winogrand didn’t approve of the term “street photographer.” “It’s a stupid term,” he once told a reporter. “I don’t think it tells you anything about a photographer or work.” Yet the photographer’s most iconic images are black-and-white shots of people conversing, waiting, kissing, and walking in New York, Los Angeles, and other distinctly American sites.
One famous image, Dealey Plaza, Dallas (1964), depicts a group standing near Dealey Plaza, holding photographs and ostensibly discussing the particulars of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Winogrand’s images often appear at a tilt. Bodies jut sideways in his frames, reminding viewers that although they’re looking at documentation of reality, it’s with a significant creative slant.
Bill Cunningham (1929–2016)
American
Bill Cunningham
Carnegie Mansion, New York City, ca. 1968-1976
New York Historical Society
Bill Cunningham
Paris Theater, New York City , ca. 1968-1976
New York Historical Society
Bill Cunningham became a local legend as he photographed fashion for the New York Times for nearly 40 years. His weekly column, “On the Street,” compiled pictures of his favorite outfits and details from the city streets.
“I realized that you didn’t know anything unless you photographed the shows and the street, to see how people interpreted what designers hoped they would buy,” he once wrote in the Times, describing how he developed his practice.
“I realized that the street was the missing ingredient.”
Cunningham also shot galas, fashion weeks, and other high-profile events. But he remained on the fringe of the societies he documented, wearing an unassuming blue jacket with khaki pants, riding a bicycle, and refusing industry perks, like parties, and even ripping up his own checks. “Money’s the cheapest thing,” he once explained. “Liberty and freedom is the most expensive.”
Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012)
Japanese
As a teenager, Shomei Tomatsu lay awake as the Allies bombed his hometown of Nagoya, Japan. World War II, and its immediate aftermath, deeply affected the photographer. The American occupation, Surrealism, protest, and sexual liberation all entered Tomatsu’s visual language as he photographed American soldiers along Okinawa streets, wounded Japanese citizens, and prostitutes in Tokyo.
“Tomatsu makes us aware of the difficulty of seeing and of understanding what we see,” writes Juan Vicente Aliaga in the new book Shomei Tomatsu, published by Fundación MAPFRE.
“Apart from people and their actions, there are also objects, things, which are prolongations of individual people.” Indeed, a picture of an actress is also about the flag that hangs above her head, while one of a man and a woman on a Tokyo subway also focuses on the window and whatever lies, unseen, outside their car.
Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938)
American
Joel Meyerowitz dared to work in color photography when the fine-art world still only approved of black and white. Inspired by Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Meyerowitz captured the mid-century urban milieu. Humor, contrast, and human foible imbue his aesthetic—he finds a corner on New York’s Fifth Avenue where everyone is wearing a camel coat, a woman in a bright-green dress in front of a deep-red building, and four women preening on a city stoop.
Meyerowitz’s work also took a darker turn when he turned his lens toward the destruction following September 11, 2001. His frames depict rubble, firefighters, cranes, and smoke.
A grand tragedy of emptiness and soot plays out across this series.
Susan Meiselas (b. 1948)
American
Seventies style—feathery hair, high-waisted shorts, knee-high socks, plaid skirts—becomes a minor character in Susan Meiselas’s series “Prince Street Girls,” which she began in the middle of the decade. The real stars, however, are the female friends, family members, and neighbors she photographed in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. In front of walk-ups, on the subway, and in an urban playground, Meiselas focused on the collegiality and budding sexuality of local girls and women. (The series is an affectionate ode to her own home: The photographer herself was living on Mott Street.)
Meiselas shot “Prince Street Girls” after a series on carnival strippers. Yet her movement toward mundane daily ritual didn’t last long. In 1978, she flew to Nicaragua to begin one of her best-known bodies of work, which captured figures from the country’s Sandinista revolution and daily life in impoverished, inequitable streets.
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Alina Cohen
The 18 Most Famous Street Photographers: A Fascinating History Guide
Below you will find links to learn about the history and photography of some of the world’s leading and most famous street photographers, both past and present. The photographers are split into loose groups.
Read these snippets to learn more about some of the best street photographer’s in the world before clicking through to read a detailed article.
Robert Frank: While many of his contemporaries were photographing the optimistic post-war United States of the ’50s, the Swiss-born Frank set out on a road trip to capture a much darker and more realistic view of the country, culminating in arguably the most famous book in photographic history, The Americans. He explored the country, capturing subjects who were on the fringes of society, outsiders, yet entirely American. This body of work has and continues to influence a generation of photographers.
Garry Winogrand: The godfather of classic New York street photography, the restless and energetic Winogrand obsessively captured daily life in both the city and around America from the ’50s to the early ‘80s.
His body of work defined the post-World War II era America, filled with opulence and power, but mixed with a deep underlying anxiety. Fast-moving, off-kilter, witty, and spontaneous photographs defined his style.
Josef Koudelka: A stateless man after needing to escaping his home of Czechoslovakia for photographing the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, Koudelka traveled the world, focusing his photography on stateless people, most famously including the Romani (gypsies) of Eastern Europe. Wanderers, loaners, and outcasts were frequent subjects of Koudelka. He would later find interest in landscapes that were influenced by contemporary man, and on walls – particularly the Israeli-Palestinian wall. This focus grew from the fact that he himself had grown up behind one in Czechoslovakia.
William Eggleston: A mysterious aristocratic street photographer who photographed significantly in Memphis and Tennessee. While Eggleston is primarily known for becoming a pioneer of using color as an artistic form in photography, he also set the stage for creating fascinating street photography in quiet and often ‘boring’ suburban and rural areas.
Saul Leiter: A lifelong New York photographer, Leiter’s background in painting significantly influenced his photography. Leiter used many strategies to enhance the painterly look and feel, including shooting in the rain and snow, photographing through windows, including reflections, and combining many elements at different depths, often bringing out strong colors in out-of-focus foreground elements. Leiter even purchased expired color film, which would allow for surprise color shifts. What culminated is one of the most stunningly beautiful bodies of work in photography’s history.
Helen Levitt: A New York native, Levitt set out to document the ‘ordinary,’ the immigrants, and the poorer people of New York. Attracted to the poorer areas of the city, particularly the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem, Levitt saw the streets of these neighborhoods as the living room of New York, where children played, neighbors chatted, and where people from all walks of life came together for brief but special moments.
Martin Parr: Raised to a middle-class family in Britain, the documentary work of Parr has focused intently on modern life, including the social and cultural classes of Britain, consumerism, wealth and luxury, and travel. On the surface, the work of Martin Parr is filled with playfulness, whimsy, and garish color, but deep down this humor both highlights and masks a harsh critique of society. His photographs find a way to toe the line between beautiful and ugly.
Daido Moriyama: Whereas historically, Japanese art and photography had celebrated the idea of beauty and precision, the work of Moriyama turned this philosophy on its head. Technically, Moriyama’s work was grainy, out-of-focus, too dark or washed out, abstract, blurry. He followed what is known as Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese term for beauty in imperfection. While his work looked flawed, these imperfections portrayed a sense of stark reality and highlighted the beauty in these imperfect photographs of imperfect people, in an imperfect society.
William Klein: Klein’s photography of New York, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo blurs the lines between raw, unfiltered critiques and classic beauty. His gritty, grainy, often blurred images of the 1950s would influence a generation of photographers, including Daido Moriyama. Klein never held back and influenced a generation of photographers with his seminal book, Life is Good & Good for You in New York.
Bruce Davidson: While not strictly a New York photographer, Bruce Davidson has created some of the most iconic New York photographs of the 20th century. Davidson’s subjects have including the Civil Rights Movement in the early ’60s, a Brooklyn gang, Spanish Harlem, circus performers, and most famously, a 5-year project on New York’s subway system in the gritty early ‘80s period in the city.
Trent Parke: Parke carefully intersects his own, introspective world with the external realities of his country of Australia. His photographs follow a careful dance of light, chance, mistakes, self-reflection, and exploration of this home, culminating in a wide variety of fascinating and personal photographic books and projects.
Lee Friedlander: The work of Friedlander portrays America as an unusual and almost alien social landscape. His compositions, simultaneously chaotic and orderly, seem to portray an inner turmoil about what he was seeing. Friedlander turned his eye towards the social landscape and contemporary urban life, often focusing on desolate streets, creating feelings of tension, peculiarity, and unease. In addition to his prolific work in New York, some of Friedlander’s most fascinating photographs came on road trips throughout the US. Normal, everyday, and even boring aspects of modern American life at the time were transformed into surreal and strange places.
Matt Weber: As a former taxi driver photographing the streets of New York since 1978, Weber has explored countless miles throughout the city and seen a little bit of everything. The subjects in his photographs range from embraces to fights, from Harlem to Coney Island, from the homeless to 5th Avenue. The sensibilities in his work portray a photographer who has always been in tune with the rhythms, the ideals, and the community of the true New York – both the good and the bad.
Alec Soth: While not street photography in the technical sense of the term, Soth’s work holds the spirit and influence of the genre, using a mixture of portraits and landscapes to give us a glimpse into fascinating areas of America, including the Mississippi River and Niagra Falls, mixed with a sense of himself.
Graciela Iturbide: After forgoing her traditional Catholic upbringing in Mexico, Iturbide set out to document the complex lives and relationships between the indigenous Mexico and the imported Catholic Mexico, eventually becoming one of the most important photographers in the country. She would focus on the roles of women, identity, festivals and rituals, daily life, and death, most notably capturing the Zapotec Indians in Juchitán, a place where the typical gender roles are not as often followed and women are given places of power, running the economy and local community.
Matt Black: Beginning in 2013, Matt Black set out to document impoverished communities, covering a total of 100,000 miles and 46-states around the U.
S. and focusing on areas where over 20% of people live above the poverty line.
What culminated is a vast project showing the spirit, troubles, and similarities of these spread-out communities at the heart of America.
Jason Eskenazi: Eskenazi’s Wonderland is a fairytale story capturing the time during the collapse of the Soviet Union, culminating in a widely admired and sought-after photography book.
John Free and the "Rule of Three" street photography
"To take street photographs, one must be in tune with the times, quickly notice the different details, elements and factors present in a potential subject."
John Free
John Free is an outstanding American photographer who gained worldwide fame for his extraordinary street photography. The peculiar technique of John Free helped him reach the heights in street photography, made him one of the brightest representatives of this direction. John Free still remains true to the good old photographic film - he believes that every frame is valuable, and the skill of the photographer lies in the ability to catch it correctly.
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John spent his childhood and youth in Connecticut. At first, he did not plan to connect his life with photography. For a long time, John Free was engaged in the repair of cars, and also performed custom restoration of classic car models. Among the photographer's hobbies are sailing, as well as the restoration of old wooden sailboats.
Only at a more mature age, John Free became interested in social photography, and devoted more than forty years of his life to it. The photographer notes that due to the presence of a highly paid job in the field of restoration, he can photograph exclusively for his own pleasure, not limited to the need to earn money and find lucrative contracts. nine0003
Basic principles of work
John Free is not only a talented photographer. He shoots interesting videos and uploads them to YouTube, where every street photography fan or just a casual viewer can see them for free. In his videos, John talks about the art of photography, about his attitude to life in general.
It is really interesting to listen to his reflections, from them you can learn a lot of useful information, which is a kind of "key" to understanding Mr. Free's photographs. nine0003
One of the first postulates of a street photographer, which John Free professes, is the desire to show everyday life in all its glory. He is sure that even in everyday situations, everyday trifles, one can see a deep meaning, some interesting nuances, attractive details.
Another rule of John Free (quite atypical for street photography): a street photographer should not necessarily hide during work. He does not do anything illegal or immoral, he simply seeks to capture on film a bright moment from the life of the world around him. nine0003
John Free notes that he does not like to talk about his own style of work, because there is none as such. He likes to take diverse shots without worrying that some frame will not fit into the overall stylistic concept. Much more important is the technique.
For many years he has not changed his favorite camera model, shoots on black and white film, independently develops and prints his photographs.
The main goal of the photographer, according to John Free, is to create a picture that will surely find an emotional response in the soul of the viewer. The first work was associated with the service in the Marine Corps in the early sixties. Since then, the basic postulates that he adheres to in his activities have remained unchanged. At the same time, John Free notes that the main thing for every photographer is to practice as much as possible. nine0003
"The Rule of Three"
John Free has repeatedly noted that he always tries to capture at least three objects in the frame. This is an important principle for him, since compliance with such a rule allows you to display life in its diversity and versatility, to show how closely related, at first glance, completely different things can be.
In his numerous interviews, he repeatedly faced the question of which of his works he considers his favorite, the closest emotionally to himself. The photographer replies that the most powerful photo, in his opinion, is a picture of Scott's friend with his little son. John Free is not shy about his emotions. On the contrary, he is proud of them. nine0003
The photographer notes that over the long years of his work, he has repeatedly come across shots that made him sad, sad and even tears.
Today the photographer is actively engaged in teaching activities - he regularly holds master classes and seminars for everyone who is interested in the art of photography.
Tags:genre photography, contemporaries, street photography
Street photography useful creative tips
A street photograph is a photograph taken on the street.
This type of photography appeared for the first time more than 100 years ago, as soon as it became possible to take the camera outside. And photographers began to massively capture the world around them.
“Photography is a search for what can get into the frame. When you confine events to a frame, you change those events.”
Garry Winogrand
Web Studio VDcom nine0003
How it all began
Most of the first pictures were taken in the city. The desire to capture the rapidly escaping world captured such photographers as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Harry Winogrand...
They became the first great photographers in the field of street photography.
“Photography picks up a fact from life, and it will live forever” Raghu Rai
Time has passed, cameras have become better, processing and transmission of photos to the viewer has become simpler, but the essence remains the same.
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"Photographs are open doors to the past, but they allow a glimpse into the future"
Sally Mann
"The subject is more important than the photographer"
Gordon Parks
Let's find out what lies behind the street photo? The main subject of street photography is a person. More precisely, it is its interaction with society, the environment.
“Photography is the art of frozen time... the ability to store emotions and feelings within the frame”
Meshak Otieno
These photos differ from the studio photos in that there is no place for posing or posing. The main highlight of such a photo is spontaneity.
"Outstanding photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field"
Peter Adams
perpetuate a masterpiece. It takes a lot of patience and attention to catch the right moment. nine0003
“What I like about photography is that it captures a moment that is gone forever, that cannot be reproduced”
Karl Lagerfeld
Web Studio VDcom
Where does photography begin?
To get started, you'll need a camera, a city, and a creative mind.
“There are always two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer” Ansel Adams
“Many photographers think that if they buy a better camera, they can take better pictures. The best camera won't work for you." nine0065 Arnold Newman
A little secret from a professional photographer: If you want to take a spontaneous, interesting street photo, wear discreet, simple clothes so as not to draw attention to yourself.
SOME USEFUL TIPS
- Smile.
- Stay alert.
- Shooting from the hip.
- Don't be afraid of anything. nine0142 Don't think stereotyped.
- Be part of the street.
- Look for a suitable place.
- Patience is the key to success.
The breathtaking wonders of life
Interestingly, it's not even about what kind of camera you have. Of course, it is desirable to have a camera with a rangefinder lens, but this is not essential, because the size of the camera will be more important, and the smaller it is, the better. nine0003
CREATIVE TIPS:
- Opt for a digital camera.
I think you've heard the saying, "A photographer's first 10,000 shots are the worst." If you are a beginner, trust this statement.
Thanks to a digital camera, it will be easier for you to gain experience and not be disappointed in photography after the first shots.
- Don't rush, stop.
The city is like a huge mechanism, an anthill that is constantly moving. To catch an interesting moment, you need to see it. On the run, a lot of things escape your sight. Try to pause, stop on a busy street, take a closer look at the world around you and I'm sure you will find an interesting subject for your shoot. nine0003
- The eyes are the mirror of the soul.
Eyes can tell a lot about a person. They speak even when emotions and feelings are not visible, they speak even when the person is silent. Pay attention to your eyes. In a portrait photo, in the style of street art, you will not find a more successful accent.
- Pay attention to details.
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