6.1: 6PH ON THE STREETS

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A dozen or so years ago I was in Las Vegas returning from a trip to Death Valley. The evening was cool, the street was bizarre (if you have been to Vegas you know what I mean). I started taking photographs, shooting without looking through the viewfinder in hopes that something interesting would appear in the resulting images. I shot about 350 photographs in a few hours, really just to see what would result.

The results were impressive. Well, at least to me. The twenty photographs I printed described my impressions of a city filled with loneliness, posturing, decadence, alienation, excitement, lewdness, drunkenness. A topsy-turvey world seemingly playing a strange end-game.

Twice I have been back to Vegas, and twice I have tried to replicate and expand on that set of images. And twice I have failed. I have hundreds of bad photographs to prove it.

The technique I was using is from a genre of photography called street photography, where photographers just shoot what is around them on the street, often quickly and relying on plenty of editing to get a good photograph. This style started with little-known (then) photographers in the early 20th Century. Jacques Henri-Lartique was a young photographer who wasn’t concerned with pesky things like composition. He just pointed the camera at the cool stuff around him. At about the same time Eugene Atget photographed the streets of Paris using very precise composition. Later, Helen Levitt took photographs which are sympathetic and feel honest to the people she met on the street.

Garry Winogrand is one of the later photographers who used this style of photographing. As proof of the power of editing, when he died there were about 10,000 rolls of his film that were not fully processed. Lee Friedlander’s images have an accidental feeling to them, even though they are precise. Bruce Davidson’s images are gritty and have a 1960s beat feel to them. For even grittier stuff, look at Bruce Gilden’s images. Robert Bergman’s street photographs are intimate portraits of interesting people he meets on the street.

Disclaimer (of sorts)

Even though I have shoe-horned a lot of photographers into this text, there are many that are omitted, and admittedly, many misclassified. Some of those that couldn’t quite get classified are definitely worth mentioning, such as the lush tones of Ruth Bernhard and the lyrical images of Barbara Morgan. Keith Carter and William Christenberry are known for photographs of the American South. Duane Michaels tells short stories through photographs, and Bernice Abbot is one of the history’s great photographers.

There are many other well-know photographers. Some of them I have not included because they don’t come to mind or I couldn’t find readily accessible web pages of their work. Some others I didn’t think they were appropriate for this text since their work is not as easily appreciated as the ones included.