Urban Motion

There’s an interesting and in places banal conversation going on over at the Hardcore Street Photography group on flickr.

The debate started when one of the group admins (Mark H.) picked a 6×7 shot of Wembley stadium tourists to be the discussion image of the week. A prominent member of the group believes that shooting street with 6×7 can only ever be seen as imitative because so few others do so. Yet more perplexingly another member insists that street should be much more intimate, and not be from afar - perhaps denying any more holistic environmental portrayal.

Having shot 6×7 for a while now I can truly understand just how hard it is to pull off convincing work using such a technically demanding format. What I can’t understand is why people continue to try and restrict the genre of street to their own personal preference, why should street be limited to a harsh, up close idolatry of the likes of Winogrand, why should it only be shot on 35mm? Further, does ’street photography’ really exist as a defined entity? Is it simply a nice pigeon hole to place a body of work into after the fact? Does any genre really exist as a definable entity? For me, street photography is about being in a public human environment and teasing out a moments fleeting narrative - no more, no less.

Group based communities such as flickr inherently encourage the reinforcement of this pigeon holed philosophy by banding together like minded individuals, perhaps inevitably this leads to the mistaken attribution of the often rigid goals and motives of those specialist groups with the subject matter itself.

Perhaps it’s time to rage against the machine.