'Reading' Street Photography

I run a digital print exchange in Europe (see here). A couple of people send street photographs, but comments are often of the form 'I don't get it', 'not my sort of thing', 'can't comment'. This got me to thinking what is it about street photography that makes it hard to understand or to read? I think it is partly because there is a lot of mediocre street photography out there (as there is in all photographic genres) and people get tired of looking at endless pictures on Flickr type sites of people's backs, pictures of the photographer's friends fooling around, or action that is so far away that one can hardly make out what is going on.

I am no expert on this, but from studying it lately I think there are five basic elements in street photography that considered together help to understand what it is about. These elements are combined in various ways and different photographers emphasise one or more elements over the others. Masters of the genre such as Cartier-Bresson often are adept at all five at once.

The five elements are:

1. Composition: that is the picture is made up of interesting compositional elements that strike the viewer from an aesthetic point of view.

2. Portraiture: the picture contains some interesting face(s) or personalities and would work on the level of a portrait. Sometimes these are candid, sometimes not.

3. Decisive moment: there is something going on in the picture that was captured the moment the shutter was fired. Or there is some kind of story or narrative that can be guessed at from the scene.

4. Documentary: The picture has some documentary quality about it.

5. Engagement: there is some engagement with the photographer. Either there is someone looking at the photographer or someone in the shot has noticed the photographer and this adds to the drama in some way.

The expert street photographer also imposes his or her style over the 5 elements to give the pictures a distinctive look.

Examples from Juan Buhler's Water Molotov site (this is one of my favourite street photographers on the web):

An example of 1, 2 and 3.
An example of 1, 2 and 5.
An example of 1,2 and 4.

Travis Ruse has an excellent set of images taken on the NY subway. These fall mainly in my 1, 2 and 4 category:

An example of 1, 2, 4 and 5.
An example of 1, 2, 3 and 4.
An example of 1 and 4.

John Beeching is an experienced UK street photographer who contributes to the print exchange.

A classic compositional shot.
An example of types 1-4 (and possibly 5).
Type 2, 4 and 5.

Finally, some rather less proficient examples from my own work:

A more compositional shot


A combination of documentary, portrait and engagement


More of a portrait/compositional shot



A portrait and documentary shot


A combination of portraiture, decisive moment and documentary


I tend to favour portraits and candid shots in my street photography.

Those were my thoughts on the matter. Please comment.

Some more references:

http://www.streetphotography.co.uk/
In Public
Wikipedia entry
Photo.net
Streetphoto list

I would also recommend reading Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Westerbeck and Meyerowiitz.