Street Vision

 

Pictured, photographer David Parkinson: Joe's mate from the seventies and much vaunted snapper of that era, who worked as a street and fashion photographer: a combination of sub-genres already well established in the wake of people such as David Bailey, Terence Donovan, et al, from the fifties through the sixties, combining the quick fire shooting techniques of the photojournalist, urban landscapes, social commentary and fashion: the emphasis being on spontaneity, real or 'orchestrated'. I wondered where one might put the origin of at least the core of the genre.

The obvious divider would seem to be purely technical: a lightweight and unobtrusive camera seeming to be the most significant driver in capturing one's environment and its inhabitants with as little intrusion on it as possible. Again, the obvious starting point would conceivably be the development of the Leica by Oskar Barnack, which was the first adoption of 35mm cinematic film to replace the slow-to-use photographic plates and their commensurately large cameras then currently the norm. From the development of the Ur-Leica just before the First World War onwards, compact photography became the go-to format for those seeking to document daily life on the hoof. Names such as Weegee, Hardy, Erwitt, even Diane Arbus, and just about every war photographer of the modern era, all fall roughly within the category of 'street', although the purest form of the art lies with the photographic flaneur: the wanderer of city streets seeking out the interesting amongst the mundane to document.

But to focus in on who truly represents where I think this whole thing kicked off in the first place, I have to cite some absolute giants of photography. Brassäi, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, et al: the list is far, far longer than this, but these are the foundation stones of 'street'. But the daddy of them all, in my opinion, is Eugène Atget, whose documentation of Old Paris really was the very definition of 'street' photography. The kicker is though that he continued to photograph street life on cumbersome glass plates long after the Leica was invented, whilst still maintaining an air of spontaneity in his images. A perhaps more detailed account than this thin little comment will follow at some point, methinks...