5 responses to “Podcast: A Photographic Life, Episode 373: The Conversation with Bill Shapiro ‘What Is Street Photography?’”

1. JPS Visual Week In Review ~ 07.05.25 | JerseyStyle Photography

   July 7, 2025 at 3:04 am

   […] I Listened To This Week: The UN of Photography podcast, where Grant and Bill Shapiro discuss street […]

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2. 

   Rob Campbell

   July 3, 2025 at 6:16 pm

   You both (Grant and Bill) missed a gigantic clue that you waved in the air when dating what you considered the seminal T&H book: digital.

   Before digital came along, it took money to make photographs. In other words, you required commitment to both some subject and the process before you’d do it. After digital entered the game, that no longer held: once you owned the camera and even a single lens, you were in business and could start to spend time making photographs. Of course, that instantly created a massive problem: what can you photograph without breaking the bank, and why would you choose to do it? The choices, if you exclude the boredom of photographing your pet, are not as plentiful and interesting as they might seem once you sit down and consider the options.

   An interest in photography usually requires a trigger. For many of us it used to be an interest in good-looking women, hence the drive towards fashion and pretty much anything to do with show business. Neither of those choices was easy to realise. Today, even people who have been doing it all their career have a hard time staying with it. What chance anybody else sans connections or geographical advantages? At once there is a popular, easy-access choice: street. Every goddam town has at least one of those. Game on!

   As to the definitions of street, where you decide to pin the tail depends largely on your age. I’m older than you – 88 last time I checked – and we used to have what was indeed called reportage, and also, more loosely, candid. Reportage was more associated with journalism, with the concept of telling some kind of story. (Story, sadly, is another word that has been hijacked in recent art conversation, applied to things where no story should need to exist or be expected to apply. It’s as if the single image is somehow inferior to a collection of, often, much lesser ones.) Candid, on the other hand, covered what today, broadly speaking, lives under the street umbrella, red or otherwise. Norman Hall’s Photography was a great magazine; my first published picture was there; I came across Horvat and several other European photographers for the first time in those pages.

   There’s an interesting old book called Paris Mon Amour (Taschen) that goes way back, and it is filled with reportage photography, and reportage it’s deemed to be because the photographers earned their living from it, telling stories and producing a specific kind of socialist/communist fodder that was desired by the magazines for which the stuff was shot. The concentration on particular social classes is obvious when one realises why the photographs were made in the first place: they were reports, documentation.

   The death of those magazines and the changing economic status of such “models” because of introduced or improved social lifeboats has changed the plot somewhat.

   So, if the urge to emulate Doisneau or HC-B is there in some young heart, so is the problem of finding the same characters for the show that that young guy wants to produce. Bill loves red umbrellas, a device for whose popularity Saul will ever bear the guilt, but here’s something to consider: once Saul went digital, he lost his own look. Check it out if you don’t believe me. Digital has had a massive visual impact, not necessarily a benign one.

   Street, as a word, is similar to love: each person owns their own interpretation of just what that means.

   Yes, interesting conversations you two have, but where does one find the replies from listeners? Here, the platform where I listen, replies are thin on the ground.

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   1. 

      gscott2012

      July 6, 2025 at 5:08 pm

      I read responses on the podcast. Thanks for the response here!

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3. 

   OWEN MURPHY

   July 2, 2025 at 7:05 pm

   What a great podcast this is, one of the better conversations about the nature of this subject. As one of the “old guys” I got a laugh from that comment. The word that often comes to my mind when seeing unoriginal work is tropes. I see that with work that springs from the Alex Webb fountain. The answer for me in regards to what my own work is about is being answered by the reality of being solidly in the seventh decade of my life. Thank you both for a very thoughtful discussion.

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   1. 

      gscott2012

      July 2, 2025 at 9:30 pm

      Our pleasure and thanks for the positive feedback. I hope you enjoy some of our past episodes and future ones of course!

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