Street photography, observed

Notes on watching, waiting, and the strange loop of taking pictures of people who are already taking pictures of themselves. The selfie has changed what street photography is.

Street photography used to be a study in candid observation. You waited. You watched. You raised the camera when someone did something worth photographing, and then you moved on. The subject didn't know they had been photographed. That was the point.

That version of street photography is mostly finished now. Not because photographers have stopped taking pictures. Because subjects have started taking pictures of themselves at the same time.

So what does street photography look like when everyone is already performing for a camera?

It becomes a picture of a picture. A woman in front of a fountain posing for her boyfriend's phone. A group holding up peace signs to a selfie stick. A man asking a stranger to shoot him against a monument. These are still moments worth photographing. But what they are pictures of has changed. They are pictures of the act of picture-making itself.

Is that still worth photographing?

It is. Arguably more so. A picture of someone unselfconsciously walking down a street is a scarce thing now, and worth chasing when it appears. But a picture of someone deliberately arranging themselves for a phone is a picture of the century we are actually in. Not the one we imagine ourselves in.

Does the studio approach this differently?

The camera and the eye stay the same. What changes is the awareness that most of what you are watching is already staged for another camera. The best pictures often come from photographing that gap, between how the subject wants to be seen and what is actually happening around them. The tourist and the pigeons. The influencer and the confused local. The selfie stick and the empty ancient square behind it.

If you're interested in commissioning documentary work in the same spirit, get in touch.