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“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
--Robert Doisneau, French photographer,
(1912-1994)
Street photography, long a tradition of photojournalists, historians and artists, has lately become suspect. As reported by TimesOnline, street photographers now face suspicion over concerns of pedophilia and terrorism. A new poster campaign by the Metropolitan Police encourages Londoners to call a hotline if the look of a photographer displeases them:
“Thousands of people take photos every day. What if one of them seems odd?”
--poster campaign by London Metropolitan Police, which also helpfully points out that “terrorists use cameras for surveillance.”
This makes as much sense as the duct tape defense employed by Tom Ridge’s Homeland Security which designed to protect us against the 9/11 weapon of choice: box cutters. Both beg for mockery and BoingBoing, on cue, posted a set of parody posters. The Onion should be weighing in any day now.
The Times spoke with Matt Stuart, who has been photographing London’s streets for 11 years: “For his efforts, Stuart has picked up a little collection of pink stop-and-search slips, souvenirs of practising a century-old art form in a city increasingly paranoid and authoritarian.”
Is this the future? It seems ironic that street photography should be a target when The Authorities are already filming us in airports, banks on public transport and at city intersections. What’s one more photograph of you, me or them crossing the street? As long as I’m not in my bathing suit, I’m okay with it.
In fact, some of the most famous photographs in history were taken by street photographers – Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. The LIFE Magazine shot of the jubilant sailor dude kissing the random nurse on V-J Day? That’s two total strangers making out in the street to express sheer joy and we might have missed that if Alfred Eisenstaedt handed been wandering around the street that day. (The photo is widely known as “the smack seen ‘round the world.”)
And speaking of famous kisses, who hasn’t purchased one of Robert Doisneau’s prints from a local Z Gallery? Every college kid who wanted to seem sophisticated had that Parisian kissing couple on his or her wall. It’s one of the most famous photographs in the world but initially, it was just a very human moment in a very public place, now frozen in time forever.
Fact is, few of us live our lives entirely out of public view. The street is where the culture is developed and reflected back at us through commerce, architecture, fashion, body language, advertising and the recognizing of our fellow humans – a favorite family sport called “people watching.”
Historically-speaking, shots of random street scenes are invaluable to our understanding of one another and where we’ve just come from. How folks got around town, how they dressed, where they shopped, the headlines of the day, trendy hairstyles – the candid street shot is a crucial mirror, a necessary snapshot of our collective experience in shared spaces.
How else could we possibly understand what a summer in Harlem circa 1938 could possibly look like? How else can we grasp a wild and woolly San Francisco street scene in 1968? Personally, I do not know the joy of a fire hydrant fountain during a sweltering summer in the Bronx but I have seen the celebration around it. Thanks to a photograph, I can conjure a good guess at the indescribable relief it must bring to the neighborhood kids who are dancing and dripping around it, giggling with delight.
Then there is the Native American belief – still alive and well in many cultures – that an unwelcome photograph can steal a person’s soul:
"The process of stealing an element of life through a photograph does cause, in my spiritual opinion, a degree of damage in the life force photographed. The life force may not know it, in the case of surreptitious street photographs made of people who are unaware they are being photographed, or the life force may fully consent to it in an emotionally suicidal way, such as may be the case with an under-age homeless drug-addicted girl who might ‘consent’ to being illegally photographed as part of
