Street photography
Street photography generally refers to photographs made in public places — not only streets, but parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and myriad other settings — often but not always featuring people going about their everyday lives. In one sense it can be thought of as a branch of documentary photography but unlike traditional documentary its chief aim — or at least its chief effect — is seldom to document a particular subject, but rather to create photographs which strongly demonstrate the photographer's vision of the world. Good street photography often ends up being good documentary photography without really trying, especially after the passage of a few years, but unlike documentary it seldom has an explicit social agenda or rhetorical intent. It tends to be more ironic and distanced from its subject matter.
Street photography is often closely-align with "New Topography" landscape photography — key distinctions are the sense of immediate human presence and smaller scale in typical Street Photography.
Like photojournalism, street photography often concentrates on a single human moment, caught at a decisive (or deliberately indecisive) moment. However, unlike photojournalism, the moment depicted usually has no significance in and of itself except to the interested parties and the photographer. A stolen kiss on a street corner; a man jumping a puddle; a woman lost in her thoughts in a diner; a shopping trolley glowing in the last rays of sun: these are the bread and butter of street photography but unlikely to cut much ice with a photojournalist's picture editor.
Street photography is often thought of as having reached a zenith between roughly 1940 and 1970 when many of the seminal works were created, coinciding (although it was hardly a coincidence) with the introduction of the lightweight, high-quality 35mm rangefinder camera, and exemplified in particular by the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. But in truth street photography has a much longer pedigree than that and it has continued to evolve in the decades since.
Street photography, like most other branches of photography, has been driven by both aesthetic and technological innovations, and often the introduction of new technology has had a profound impact on the prevailing aesthetic. The introduction of small, fast, high-quality digital cameras in recent years has already begun to affect the aesthetic paradigm and seems to have been responsible for an explosion of image-making in the genre.
Street photography has never been a particularly commercial branch of photography and yet it holds an abiding fascination for photographers and audiences alike, not least because the visual drama of 'the street', however defined, provides a subject which is capable of being continually revisited and reinterpreted. In this respect at least, street photography is one of the more reflexive of photographic disciplines: unlike documentary photography or photojournalism, with which it shares many features, street photography is often not primarily concerned with its subject, but with the way the subject is represented. The street photographs which anchor themselves in the mind of the viewer are generally distinctive not so much for what is seen, but the way it is seen: the quotidian rendered extraordinary.
Like jazz, street photography has a relatively small base of canonical subjects (for example, crowds, the urban landscape) which are endlessly reworked and re-seen. For this reason, the most interesting works in the genre are arguably as much about photography as they are about anything else. Perhaps this is another reason why the genre seems such a rewarding one for its practitioners.
The Twentieth Century
Street photographers have provided an exemplary and detailed record of children's street culture in Europe and North America.
Techniques
Overcoming Shyness
Shyness and Street photography seem to be mutually exclusive. However most successful street photographers have started as shy photographers. Shyness is a reluctance to make the photograph — it can paralyze you before the moment of exposure.
Some photography instructors have recommended starting-out by trying to be stealthy and using long lenses — others suggest bypassing such crutches and leaping "deep end of the pool" into the street with a normal or wide-angle lens. Sometimes the use of extreme wide angles and appearing to be pointing the camera somewhere else than the subject can help, at the expense of direct involvement with the action. Other photographers (most notably Philip Lorca diCorcia, who actually has set up elaborate strobe rigs onto street corners in advance of unknown action) stand at one point on the street and wait for the subject to appear. Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden's famously-direct method, of just suddenly walking up to people in New York at close range with a powerful strobe — he has claimed to have never suffered an aggressive response — shows that the demeanor of the photographer before and after the moment of exposure is a key element to interaction on the street — with the latter more important.
Invisibility
It is said that Henri Cartier Bresson would wrap a large handkerchief around his camera and pretend to be blowing his nose while he took the picture. There are many variations to the stealthiness theme, some involving the use of waist-level finders in cameras but the general idea is to keep the subject/s from being aware that they are being photographed. Another aspect of invisibility involves "blending-in" with the crowd. Dressing like an archaetypical foreign correspondent, wearing a Trilby hat, photographer's vest and camera bag generally will guarantee that everyone is aware of you. Observe the ways of the crowd and try to dress and behave in an inconspicous manner, according to the circumstances.
Some photographers thrive on directness, however. Martin Parr, for example, is typically quite open and direct about his business, and photographs using a hard-to-hide ring flash unit on a large camera. Street photographers who are fond of wide-angle lenses will often work so close to their subjects that they surely must be seen. Each practitioner must find their own balance.
While exceptions such as Beat Streuli exist, in general street photography made from a distance, with a long lens, is considered flat and uninteresting -- the dominant aesthetic has stressed the photographer's presence "in" the scene, potentially interacting (subtly or otherwise) with the subjects but nearly always from a nearby, almost tactile, distance.
Since the days of Paul Strand, some photographers (such as Helen Levitt) have also used trick lenses which shoot to the side, rather than directly in front of the camera. Leica and other manufacturers have long made such mirror attachments.
Dealing with confrontation
It all depends on a photographer's quick assessment of the situation. Almost always, a photographer can smile and give one of three excuses: (1) "Oh, hi, I'm a photography student working on a project;" (2) "Don't worry, sir, I was taking a shot of ________, you weren't in the photo;" or, for the most daring, (3) "I'm a photographer with the New York Times doing a story on [insert quickly-generated idea here]." Alternatively, in most cases if the photographer apologizes and retreats, or even just continues walking while acting like they've taken no notice, the angry subject will continue on with their own business. In very rare cases, it may be necessary to hand over the film to someone who is truly intent on physically harming the photographer — though in the U.S. there is no legal grounds to force you to (even in the face of police demands to do so).
Asking permission
This is surely a good way to avoid uncomfortable confrontations with subjects, but it seems like cheating to many photographers, because it betrays the sense of truth and objectivity with that street photography is often thought to have. It creates the potential for the subject to act, pose, appear differently than they would have naturally because they now are aware that they are the subject of a photograph.
Technical Photographic Issues
Film Speed / ISO Sensitivity
Outside, in daylight, any ISO will do. At dusk and in the evening, a street photographer will probably experience failure with anything slower than 800 or 1600, unless they have a tripod (but why would a street photographer carry a tripod?).
Shutter Speed
Some images can be enhanced by good use of slow shutter speeds to show motion. However, given the fact that most street photography is done handheld and with a 50mm lens, most photographers will insist on using a shutter speed of at least 1/60th of a second. Remember the rule: for handheld shots, the minimum shutter speed should be 1/x, where x = the length of your lens.
Aperture & Depth of Field
A medium aperture, in the range of f/4 to f/8 will generally be preferred for fast shooting in daylight (this will vary according to the format used: 35mm, digital, 6x6, etc). The extended Depth of Field will render the subjects in focus even if they're moving or the photographer cannot exercise careful focusing. For static subjects, the use of large apertures, f/2.8 or wider, can help separate the subject from the background through shallow Depth of Field.
Pre-focusing
The aperture a street photographer chooses to use has some impact on a pre-focus setting, but if a photographer can determine that he will be approximately 10 feet away from most of his subjects, he may wish to pre-focus at that distance, thus avoiding the manipulation of focus at the decisive moment.
Equipment for Street Photography
Street photography has been made with equipment as varied as cellphones to 4x5 view cameras. The "classic" street photo camera has been the 35mm Leica rangefinder. The attributes praised by Leica users define a canonical set of features desired in Street Photo equipment.
A good street camera should be light, quick to operate, quiet and of good quality. 35mm cameras have dominated this ideal until recent years when digital cameras appeared. Currently there is something of a gap -- compact digitals are inconspicuous, quiet, and light, but slow in operation. Digital SLRs are quick to operate but generally large, heavy, and relatively loud. This gap, however, closes a bit with each passing year of technological improvement. Epson R-D1 digital camera is the prime example of the closing gap.
The #1 criterion in choosing a street photo camera, unless some external consideration (such as large negative or stealth) is of interest, is that the camera be comfortable to operate in the hand of the specific photographer.
Legalities
Your rights as a Street Photographer
General
Photographing without permission
In the United States, anything visible ("in plain view") from a public area can be legally photographed. This includes buildings and facilities, people, signage, notices, and images. It is not uncommon for security personnel to use intimidation or other tactics to attempt to stop the photographer from photographing their facilities (trying to prevent, e.g., industrial espionage), however there is no legal precedent to prevent the photographer so long as the image being photographed is in plain view of a public area.
In recent years some building owners have claimed a copyright on the appearance of their building — such landmarks as the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, Pittsburgh's PPG Plaza, etc. U.S. copyright law, however, explicitly exempts the appearance of standing buildings from copyright.
On public property
See above.
Publication
In general, you can not publish someone's image to endorse a product or service without first acquiring a "model release," which is (usually) a contract between the publisher or photographer and the subject.
Defamation
It is somewhat difficult to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which a photograph, by itself, would be defamatory, since the key element of defamation is falsity. Perhaps if a person was photographed in such a way that made them appear to be engaging in some indecent activity, it could qualify as defamatory. Digital editing of photographs certainly opens the floodgates for defamation because it is easy to turn a formerly "true" photograph into one that does not depict anything near the truth.
Invasion of Privacy
In 1890, Samuel Warren and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis published "The Right to Privacy," which made their case for recognition of invasion of privacy as a legal tort.
Fifteen years later, in the case Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Company, a Georgia court was the first to rule on the balance between the right to privacy over freedom of the press, when it found that Mr Pavesich had been wronged by the appearance of an unauthorized advertisement in which his photograph appeared. The court at that time ruled that commercial usage did not have the same press protections as other forms of use.
Earlier, in 1893, the case Corliss v. Walker had set the related precedent that non-commercial use, in this case an unauthorized biography, was indeed an example where press freedom's inherent public interest could not be overruled by the right to privacy. These two cases along with the abovementioned "The Right to Privacy" have become the basis for almost all US law with respect to the balance between freedom of expression and individual privacy.
Some other restrictions of photography exist in the US, but most have to do with either commercial use of a space (such as forbidding photography inside a private building) or national security (such as restrictions on airport security areas or military installations).