The term "Street Photography" is a bit misleading. It invites debates all the time, and I confess to having thrown my opinion around in more than one. Some argue if it’s not taken on a street it’s not a street photo, but then will also argue that a photo taken on a street without people in it is just a landscape. Others will argue that the location doesn’t matter as much as the process, and that as long as it’s candid it can be street, but there are certainly posed and set up portraits which are undeniably street.
It’s probably unresolvable, for myself at least I’ve settled more on the feeling and the attitude to make my own judgements. Street becoming more of a descriptor rather than criteria. Does the photo make me feel something, does it make me ask questions, do I wonder what happened before and after the shot, do I immediately start wondering about the people (if there are people)? It becomes the experience of experiencing. A kind of voyeuristic spectator of the human condition, which sounds obnoxious when I type it out like that but it’s not entirely misrepresentative. It’s codified people watching, every image becoming an eternity of possible storylines.
Last month I was in Norway visiting some of the most picturesque landscapes on the planet, and while they were as breathtaking as expected, I often found myself captivated by the others on the same journey experiencing the same thing I was. Who were they, what led them here and what did they think about it, what stories would they tell the people they spoke with wherever they were heading next? Can you take a street photo on a boat in middle of a fjord? I think so.
