Hello friend! Today I wanted to write a bit about how to make great street photography. I think the one thing that every street photographer has in common is a love for other people. This characteristic is common among street photographers because in order to go out and spend any serious amount of time trying to take photographs of people that you don’t know, you need to have some kind of emotional attachment to the subject. Side note I think all great art comes from having an attachment to the subject that goes beyond composing them well. In order to make something that really tugs on peoples heartstrings you need to have an emotional attachment to whatever it is that you’re photographing. For me that can be a crowd of people, a single person, or whatever it is that humanity has made and left behind on this earth. I know that It’s not going to make any impact on the viewer if I don’t have an honest love for the subject.
Street Photography requires love
I’ve mentioned this before on this blog that I think a good photograph requires a certain sensibility, a kind of attachment that’s hard to put in words. I can’t really explain why I love these people (at least not in words, that’s what the photographs are trying to do.) because I don’t know them. The best I can do is to say that I felt something when being there, something that required me to press the shutter button. Something that compelled me to believe that if humanity doesn’t remember what’s in front of me, then that’s a loss for humanity. I’m not a journalist trying to tell you the who, what, where, when, and why, I’m just trying to show you a good photograph of the subject matter that intrigues me. I enjoy being in the constant process of learning how to make great street photography. It’s an enjoyable way to express myself, practice empathy, and learn more about the world that I live in.
Is Photography the Truth?
Photography is a funny thing. We capture the photons of light and then look at them later on. We often talk about how we’re capturing the thing in front of us but a more accurate description would be that we’re simply projecting images into the future. These images don’t contain the people or the things that they show, they merely represent them, if we choose to think of these representations that way. We often talk about great images as if the photographs contain the actual thing that was there, as if true reality decided to break a piece off and let a part of itself be taken away and carried into the final print. But these tiny collections of drops of ink on a piece of paper don’t really show what was going on, they’re just visual fragments made from what went on, so detailed and lifelike that they make us think that the world itself can be taken away and carried into the final print. I really like this part about photography.
