Street Photography

I'm finally beginning to feel better. Today I went out for a good long stroll for the first time in weeks. It's rainy, as it usually is here for eight or nine months of the year, but people in Portland are not deterred by rain. We wear caps or raincoats with hoods. Few carry umbrellas because rain is a way of life for us. This fellow huddles under an eave with his coffee and his Sunday paper, letting the misting rain dampen his shoulder as shoppers pass by with their hoods up while his damp dog huddles under an empty chair.

I've spent my down time studying street photography by Vivian Maier, who was completely unknown in her lifetime, and Helen Levitt, who was celebrated, exhibited, and paid as a photographer but never achieved anything like financial success. Four-minute video full of thought-provoking theory here. Our library has a number of books of their work, so I've been poring over those books, sitting with their pictures, asking myself what makes a street photo interesting or not, what makes it ethical or not (does it exploit? does it engender compassion or ridicule? is it intrusive?). I wonder what inspired Maier to keep on working, when she never shared her work. I wonder what inspired Levitt to keep competing in the cut-throat world of New York artists and photographers, even after someone broke into her apartment and stole her life's work. I wonder what gets any of us up and out with our cameras, and I think only love can explain it.

Some of us love human flesh sandwiched between concrete, glass, and steel on city streets, each person absorbed in their own world in close proximity to others. We love the ways people dress and move, the ways we are absurd and endearing, the ways we seek solitude in public places. We love how we need touch, and sometimes we touch each other or our animal companions. We love what connects us, even when it is our loneliness in proximity with the loneliness of others. Street photography is much harder than it looks, because in order to get a sharp image, you have to STOP moving, at least for a second or two, but when you stop in the street, that attracts attention and changes the energy of the moment. I want to get better at it, and I'm grateful for Maier and Levitt as models.

Today is sub Sunday, the day we're encouraged by Blip Central to link to a journal we love which we think is under-appreciated. I couldn't choose between two, so I'm going to mention both of them. I love Fotodiario because of his street photography, most of which takes place in Brazilian cities. He doesn't do much commenting, so he doesn't get a lot of browsing traffic, but I urge people to subscribe to his journal for his respect and admiration for working people. And then there's Lido Beach. She does a lot of nature photography, especially when she and her partner go out camping or hiking. She's a lawyer with a demanding full-time job, so she has little time for commenting, but what I love about her journal is her writing: pithy and succinct. She has a genre of poetry she has made her own: she calls it the six-word poem. Like this. Also worth a sub, and very low-maintenance because she can't spare much time for commenting.