Street photography is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
"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.""
The street photographer can be seen as an extension of the flaneur, an observer of the streets (who was often a writer or artist).
Framing and timing can be key aspects of the craft with the aim of some street photography being to create images at a decisive or poignant moment.
Street photography can focus on people and their behavior in public, thereby also recording people's history. This motivation entails having also to navigate or negotiate changing expectations and laws of privacy, security and property. In this respect the street photographer is similar to social documentary photographers or photojournalists who also work in public places, but with the aim of capturing newsworthy events; any of these photographers' images may capture people and property visible within or from public places. The existence of services like Google Street View, recording public space at a massive scale, and the burgeoning trend of self-photography (selfies), further complicate ethical issues reflected in attitudes to street photography.
Much of what is regarded, stylistically and subjectively, as definitive street photography was made in the era spanning the end of the 19th century through to the late 1970s; a period which saw the emergence of portable cameras that enabled candid photography in public places.
Most kinds of portable camera are used for street photography; for example rangefinders, digital and film SLRs, and point-and-shoot cameras.
An example of a hand-held portable camera, the Leica I
The commonly used 35 mm full-frame format-focal lengths of 28 mm to 50 mm, are used particularly for their angle of view and increased depth of field, with wide-angle lenses potentially permitting a candid close approach to the human subjects without their suspecting they are in the frame. However there are no exclusions as to what might be used.
With zone focusing, the photographer chooses to set the focus to a specific distance, knowing that a certain area in front of and beyond that point will be in focus. The photographer only has to remember to keep their subject between those set distances.
The hyperfocal distance technique makes as much as possible acceptably sharp so that the photographer is freed up even further, from not having to consider the subject's distance, other than not being too close. The photographer sets the focus to a fixed point particular to the lens focal length, and the chosen aperture, and in the case of digital cameras their crop factor. Thus everything from a specific distance (that will typically be close to the camera), all the way to infinity, will be acceptably sharp. The wider the focal length of the lens (i.e. 28 mm), and the smaller the aperture it is set to (i.e. f/11), and with digital cameras the smaller their crop factor, the closer to the camera is the point at which starts to become acceptably sharp.
Alternatively waist-level finders and the articulating screens of some digital cameras allow for composing, or adjusting focus, without bringing the camera up to the eye and drawing unwanted attention to the photographer.
Anticipation plays a role where a relevant or ironic background that might act as a foil to a foreground incident or passer-by is carefully framed beforehand; it was a strategy much used for early street photographs, most famously in Cartier-Bresson's figure leaping across a puddle in front of a dance poster in Place de l'Europe, Gare Saint Lazare, 1932.
Tony Ray-Jones listed the following shooting advice to himself in his personal journal:
Be more aggressive Get more involved (talk to people)Stay with the subject matter (be patient)Take simpler pictures See if everything in background relates to subject matter Vary compositions and angles more Be more aware of composition Don’t take boring pictures Get in closer (use 50mm lens [or possibly ‘less,’ the writing is unclear])Watch camera shake (shoot 250 sec or above)Don’t shoot too much Not all eye level No middle distance
Street photography and documentary photography can be very similar genres of photography that often overlap while having distinct individual qualities.
Documentary photographers typically have a defined, premeditated message and an intention to record particular events in history. The gamut of the documentary approach encompasses aspects of journalism, art, education, sociology and history. In social investigation, often documentary images are intended to provoke, or to highlight the need for, societal change. Conversely, street photography is disinterested by nature, allowing it to deliver a relatively neutral depiction of the world that mirrors society, "unmanipulated" and with usually unaware subjects.
