The struggle called street photography

In an unguarded moment I binged both the documentary about photographing nanny Vivian Maier and the one about the force of nature that was Garry Winogrand.

The series “Close Up” is fantastic. Different documentaries, but with a clear thread running through: a great many photos of a great many unknown people. Maier and Winogrand made so many street photographs that they eventually left hundreds of rolls behind. Undeveloped rolls, photos they never saw themselves.

Curious who else has captured the street that way? I listed a number of well-known street photographers and well-known documentary photographers.

Photos of stolen moments, important or entirely trivial. Moments in restaurants, bars, zoos. Selfies of shadows, reflections and families, their own or otherwise. Whole shopping streets, events. People smoking at the nursery and swimming naked in public fountains. Those were different times, for the street photographer as well. Privacy meant your toilet door could be locked.

The thread running through street photography workshops and talks is that overarching question: “Is all this actually allowed, what we street photographers do?” It feels almost more important than the creative process. “Is it allowed?” The fear that someone will tell you they do not want to be photographed, and what on earth you think you are doing with that camera.

The same people who do not think twice about round the clock camera surveillance in car parks, shopping streets and on beaches. “What are you doing? You have no right to make my portrait.” Partly through the arrival of the GDPR and the normalising of social media, we are more aware of our privacy than ever and some would like to take that privacy as far as it will go.

A photo, however well and respectfully taken, has become a threat to that privacy, even though we do not know exactly what that privacy amounts to, let alone what the effect of a photo taken actually is. We pursue an ambiguous concept without wanting to see the bigger picture. Of course, some photos do not deserve a beauty prize, but we forget to encourage the photographers who help us record moments we do not want to forget.

In the same breath as the complaining, Google stores every metre we walk and TikTok knows all about that cheeky WhatsApp message to a particular colleague. WhatsApp, so Facebook, is reading along too. We try to buy cigarettes discreetly and are recorded on footage that will only be deleted in a fortnight, with plenty of time to make a clip on X, formerly Twitter, in order to catch a shoplifter. Quite right that they are traced, of course. But that is not my point. There you are, on the crime appeal programme, clearly identifiable by your flashy watch, with your face blurred out.

I watch those documentaries with a certain wistfulness and wonder why people back then did not raise the alarm. Why there was no mass complaining about privacy being violated by street photographers who fired a flash straight into your face and sometimes earned more than a million from photos of people who had no idea they would appear in books, on t-shirts and in museums.

I think that, in the great scheme of things, that one portrait taken is so utterly insignificant that people simply did not get worked up about it. Not even when, in the 1970s and 1980s, crowds of street photographers gathered in city centres. It simply does not matter that much. That one photo of you slipping on a banana skin has not been taken yet, and probably never will be.

In fact, if it is taken, you are probably not even recognisable in it. That photo of you walking through town with your partner, dodging the rain under your umbrella, or sitting quietly with a drink on a terrace, the sun right on your face, is actually rather a nice photo.

We have been made nervous with a false sense of privacy and we use it as an excuse to complain, get angry and seek a confrontation with the photographer. I feel the urge to make even more photos. To go looking for people underneath a security camera, photograph them and ask which camera bothers them more. Which camera they fear more. I think of the artist Banksy, but realise I cannot trade one kind of privacy for another. It is not a contest.

I thought about street photography without faces, an impossibility. The field of street photography is too broad to limit yourself. Its documentary character chafes against the so-called fine art aspect. People make the city, with emotions and frustrations, with their smiles and their grimaces. The way we watch films, the city passes by the street photographer. Without today’s protagonists we do not understand how the film unfolds. We lose context. It becomes a second of slapstick torn out of the story, a petrified landscape photograph without character.

I catch myself regularly talking to others about “interesting subjects” rather than “compelling people”. Perhaps it is an unconscious way of sidestepping the thorny matter of privacy. Not the law, but the sword of Damocles.

Of course I keep documenting. With feeble excuses such as journalistic and artistic freedom I justify what has at express speed become an irreversible passion: documenting the now, in fine images and staring glances. They are not excuses for myself, but words with which I reassure the extras who have grown uncertain. Put them at ease. I am happy to send you the photos.

I document the now by using my camera to look for people who do or do not notice that I am making a photo. In the firm conviction that some of my photos will eventually be looked at in fifty years and that someone will then say: “Thank goodness we still have the photos.”

This article first appeared in Focus Magazine (the best photography magazine in the Netherlands), for which I wrote a column in every issue in 2023 and 2024.