The glass front of the lobby of the Saxo Bank building, Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Aerostar wing-walkers fly by at the 2011 Museum of Flight airshow, East Fortune, Scotland.
De Havilland Australia DH-84A Dragon 3 flies towards storm clouds at the 2011 Museum of Flight Airshow, East Fortune, East Lothian, Scotland.
Stolp Starduster Too G-JIII drops off a smoky loop at the Museum of Flight airshow at East Fortune, July 2011.
Two Breitling Wingwalkers from the AeroSuperBatics display team fly into the clouds at the 2011 East Fortune Museum of Flight Airshow.
Street photography used to be about urban/city life – about life on the street – the interaction of people and places. As a counterpoint, there was both architectural (building focused) and urban (more generic than buildings but less people-focused than street) photography.
But in the last couple of years the two terms have increasingly been conflated – street photography and the urbanist photography of streets have almost merged together, as they have in Rickard’s photos. This hasn’t gone unchallenged:
https://twitter.com/#!/NickTurpin/status/154226917946560512
Turpin’s right to resist this amalgamation: street photography is primarily about people on the street, while urbanist street photography is about streets that happen to have people in them. Turpin’s had a fair bit of flack for this on twitter, often along the lines of ‘you can’t have impermeable boundaries between photography disciplines’.
But you can’t (or should I say you shouldn’t) also retrospectively re-cast what photography is about either: to do so lacks discipline (in that it’s an intellectual short-cut that’s frequently obscured from the viewer) and is a convenient cop-out. This is photography as a form of comprehensive record-keeping, that has then subsequently been selectively edited to create a documentary style commentary on modern American urban life. It’s a great approach, and the results are really fascinating. In this, photography is a tool. In street photography, photography is the tool.
But it’s not street photography, and to label it as such shows a surprising ignorance of photographic history.
Long exposure of the Big Wheel during Edinburgh’s Winterfest, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh.
Merry Christmas [etc.] to all…!
The sun sets over the factories and windmills at Zaanse Schans, a world heritage site in the Netherlands just outside of Amsterdam.
Photo of a street performer on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh.
Women cyclists from the Specialised road racing team wait at the start line before the Bermuda Grand Prix, Hamilton Bermuda.