If you search on the web for articles concerning the history of street photography you have the impression that they all start from the origins of the “genre”, ranging from straight photography to documentary photography and reportage. Correct, but if i ask you to give me an exact date corresponding to the origin of this photographic type, what would you reply?
I believe that true street photography was born in the ‘60s, in the years when in an emblematic city such as New York City (universally recognized as the capital of the genre by Joel Meyerowitz e Markus Hartel) there happened to be an intense re-evaluation of reportage.
Lee friedlander but especially Garry Winogrand focused on the inconditional capture of images of city life (famous is the portfolio entitled “New York” of 1963).
In perfect continuity between reportage and the new born street photography, Leica accustomed a fetish camera to capture scenes containing subjects that were unconciously photographed, without giving any importance to the preparation of the scene or posing of the aforementioned subjects.
Winogrand and friedlander took an enormous quantity of photographs (in the order of several hundreds of thousands), gaining a trustful and economic support by the guggenheim foundation; in terms of exhibitions, they were both frequent guests of Moma, in particular in 1967 – together with diane arbus – with the exibition entitled “new documents”.
Steet photography mixes with pop culture, and this is true to the present day where often pictures that obtain the greatest success are those that remind us of the mythical era, maybe even simply by a pair of sun glasses framed in white or by the face of an aged woman with fluffy hair (always rarer to come across nowdays).
This is also the reason why street photography is often in black and white. Something to reflect upon…
And street photography, in my opinion, has the need to maintain a certain level of aesthetics, leaving the freedom of language to anyone who has the possibility to explore other moods and mental facades, even towards the most futuristic of beings.
But street photography will always inevitably take source from the pop culture, because the city and metropolis is pop, the ideal jungle (although not the only one) figuring as perfect location for snapshots by the streepher.
While the 1960s did see the emergence of a new type of street photography, I don't agree that this period was the birth of the genre.
From my point of view, street photography came into being in the 1940s, with people like Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Louis Faurer, and Ted Croner, who were themselves influenced by the earlier work of people like Atget, Kertész, Brassaï, etc. (Although those earlier works were more along the lines of "documentary" and "urban observation.")
The main difference is that the 1940s-era work was far more expressionistic than the work that came later. During the post-war era society in both Europe and the Americas was going through a lot of social change and recovering from a huge collective trauma, which caused a lot of artists to create "from within" as opposed to reflecting from without. There was more of a sense of surrealism (in the classic sense; as in, the search for psychological meaning in banal, everyday events) and an emphasis on the photographer's subjectivity. For example, Ted Croner said of his work "They weren't pictures of people. The were pictures of the way I felt."
Bear in mind that this was during the second wave of existentialism in Europe (Sartre, Camus, etc.) and of Abstract Expressionism in America (Pollock, De Kooning, etc.). These movements influenced each other very much. This was, after all, a time before Facebook and Twitter, so large and influential movements in art had a lot more inertia than today, when everyone does their own thing and trends only last for ten minutes.
The post-war era peaked with Robert Frank ("The Americans"). That simply couldn't be topped, plus by then the beats were shifting things away from the hyper-intellectual and more towards ideas around direct experience. That paved the way for the photographers you talked about, who took a different path. (Garry Winogrand famously said "I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph.")
So there was definitely a shift in street photography in the 1960s, and the work from that era is very influential. Where we seem to disagree is the question of "what is 'true' street photography?" You feel it began in the 1960s when street photographers played with pop culture and direct experience, whereas I feel it began in the 1940s when they were reflecting both personal and social fears and anxieties. Vive la différence! :-)
My article was a provocation, in a certain sense.
I do not deny that street photography was born before of the sixty but I claim that the genre has become kind to its own only from those years.
The photographers of 40, in fact, they told everyone to make reportage, or more simply photography. In the 60's a new breed of photographers began to talk about Street Photography.
It is no coincidence that Robert Frank was talking about Straight Photography. I'm not saying that many of the works of Bresson, Atget, Kertèsz are not pure street photography. They are, indeed.
I argue in my article, however, that street photography has become a genre starting by 60's.
I hope to be able to clarify my point of view.
I see your point. I'm still not sure I agree, but I appreciate the provocation. :-)
According to this video from the US, street photography is now becoming a type of fashion photography:
http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/sign-of-the-times-street-photographers-26668093.html