Into the street, a history of street photography

A painter who took photographs in secret. A nanny who showed her work to no one. A photographer with his camera under his coat: in this book you meet people who each looked at life on the street in their own way. The timeline starts in 1838 and runs to 2023, when an AI image won a major photography award. In between, you read about the small camera, the decisive moment in Paris, New York as a stage and the arrival of colour.

The Netherlands gets a chapter of its own, with Eva Besnyö, Cas Oorthuys, Ed van der Elsken, Cor Jaring and Julie Hrudová, among others. The question ‘Is that even allowed?’ belongs here too, because photographing people raises questions about their rights. I discuss the Vondelpark ruling, the court case around Doisneau’s kiss and portrait rights, among other things. At the back, I take one lesson from the work of each of sixteen photographers or duos. That way it doesn’t stop at knowing who lived when.

For copyright reasons, the work of those photographers isn’t in the book. That is why every chapter has a ‘Look it up’ box, so you can hold their photographs up next to it on your phone or laptop. The photographs in the book are mine, settings included. Almost every chapter ends with an assignment, ten in all. Because I wrote this book to make you feel like going out into the street again, not to test you on dates.