Photography established itself in a period when the growth of the city and industry had already provoked a formidable literature and art in response to the increasing influence of urban areas, especially cities such as London, Paris and New York.
Photography responded to the variety and multiplicity of urban life and experience, and to question how urban space was perceived and represented
It's significant that the depiction of the city in painting related much to the development of the panorama. The picture below is a section from Robert Barker, titled Novel View of the City and Castle of Edinburgh (1788). He was the inventor of the 360 view. The panoramas reflect an attempt to bring paintings closer to the actual nature of seeing than it had ever been before. The photograph was thus an appropriate from to succeed it.
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| Robert Barker's Novel View of the City and Castle of Edinburgh (1788) |
A panoramic view control and possession by the eye.
We see all of a city from a single point of view. The eye imagines that it dominates a dense and disparate space whilst simultaneously keeping the city at a distance. The view suggests the totality of the urban scene and, crucially, makes the eye of the viewer the centre of totality.
Photographers would document changes in social conditions and environments in urban areas. The camera acts as a detective, moving through streets and areas otherwise prohibited to an outsider's eye. --> e.g. Alfred Stieglitz
There are multiple layers of what constitutes the meaning of an individual urban identity. No single photographic response achieves any definitive vision of what it stalks, so where Stieglitz favoured the avenue - broad expanses of urban space where the eye is free to roam at will, either upward or indiscriminately - Jacob Riis limited himself to the alley and they court.
--> Both are extremes, but both equally underlie very different aesthetics of the city and the way in which the physical and perceptual space of the city scene is to be negotiated and interpreted by the camera. It plays into the complicated language of visualisation and what the eye privileges as part of its preconceived image of what the city might be or should be.
Lewis Hine, the official photographer of the construction of the Empire State Building. Take a look at his work of presenting smaller details of the landscape, and even primarily focusing on human figures in urban spaces with his photographs. The human figure is always central to the meaning behind his work. His work also underlines the extent to which the city has been viewed as a spectacle.
Flaneur - A man who saunters around observing society.
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Turpin, N (2002) Street Photography? iN-PUBLiC Magazine Article, Source: http://www.in-public.com/information/what_is, Date Accessed: 2nd March 2016
Primarily street photography is not reportage, it is not a series of images displaying, together, the different facets of a subject or issue. For the street photographer there is no specific subject matter and only the issue of ‘life’ in general, they don’t leave the house in the morning with an agenda and they don’t visualise their photographs in advance of taking them. street photography is about seeing and reacting, almost by-passing thought altogether.
There is a high degree of empathy with the subject matter, street photographers often report a loss of ‘self’ when carefully watching the behaviour of others, such is their emotional involvement.
The street photographer finds or creates the meaning in their images. They have no props or lighting, no time for selecting and changing lenses or filters, they have a split second to recognise and react to a happening. (A Decisive Moment?)
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