Street Photography Exhibition

[Peta Tzunami]

I came across this website through a e-newsletter called "Dharma Notes (http://www.dharmanotes.com)." I found it to be an interesting website, so I thought I'd share with the TM.

One of the most interesting movements in photography is known as "street photography." As a photographer, I've
practiced it on a regular basis, posting the results at my site at www.streetshoot.com (http://www.streetshoot.com).

Some of the masters of the form include such people as Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand and others. What becomes obvious is that the finished product, the print, often captures a moment in time in its natural state. Nothing is posed, things are simply as they are at the moment the photo was taken. But what is especially appropriate for ention in DharmaNotes is the process of taking the pictures, not necessarily the results themselves.

Cartier-Bresson is well known for having coined the phrase, "the decisive moment," to signify that what may be especially telling in the photograph has somehow been anticipated and yet when the moment arrives there can be no hesitation or question. The finger moves. It is a remarkable moment in which a person and the event and the moment merge into one. It is not, in other words, a question of setting a camera on a tripod and clicking pictures automatically, hoping to catch something. It is a sort of dance, evidenced by the fact that Cartier-Bresson literally would take a hop or appear to be doing a dance step as he raised the Leica to his eye and fired.

----An excerpt from the article "Zen Photography" by Brian Robertson, Editor, with a link to the website----

Maybe someone here will find this interesting...

[brachyrhynchos]

I find street photography mesmerizing, but for some reason I never thought of going on the net to look for it. Thanks for the link! An interesting site as is Robertson's color site, but what was with that solarization on the mouse-over?

[elelle]

Thanks much for those links Peta.

Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand, Gordon Parks and William Eggleston are some of my primary inspirations as a photographer. As a practioner of this art, I can add that the "dance" has two distinct parts. The best part is hanging out, becoming involved with one's milieu, and framing to the best of one's ability what can be taken in.

I used to just stay put in a certain spot that "felt right" in Memphis, New Orleans, or some forlorn piece of the MSPI Delta, and wait. Usually, it was wait, hang out, talk to folks, but the place was always right. Something would happen, and a fine picture would result. I don't know how to explain this rationally, but even in portaiture, which I have a decent reputation for, I always found the place to set the person in.

Street Portraits always put me in a gone yond space. Time stops in it's normal everyday sense. You leave all your "gotta do this" perception and pay attention to the moment. It usually takes me several hours to snap out of that and into the normal way of being.

The second part of the dance is to technically execute the print, which is as least as painstaking as the first part. I still get whupped up when I see a negative come out of the tank that is half as much as I'd hoped for. And then to print it well on paper is another process. I suppose that everything I've learned is antiquated by digital processes, but I still love the old alchemy. And I always have to see it pesonally through from shuttercock to final print to make it worthwhile. That's what makes that particular passing moment shine.

Thanks for making me remember that, Peta!