Street Photography: Pocket Guide

01	STREET PHOTOGRAPHY FUNDAMENTALS

WHAT IS STREET PHOTOGRAPHY?

Now there’s a controversial question to start things off! For the purposes of this Pocket Guide, we’ll take a fairly broad definition: a good starting point is “candid public photography.” This amounts to photographing unstaged, unmediated encounters in public spaces. Does a street photo always need to include people? Usually, yes, but there’s no hard and fast rule; sometimes an implication or suggestion of humanity will suffice.

One of the difficulties we encounter as street photographers is how to make our world look interesting—and herein lies one of the problems with the genre. We have all seen boring pictures of a man crossing the road, someone sitting in a café window, ...