Street photography is one of my few interests that stay with my constantly changing mind – the joy of exploring new places, the anticipation for the next best shot, the thrills of capturing the decisive moments… the list goes on, but still I’m sometimes bored and tired of taking the same old photos and viewing the same old things. Think photos of strong contrasts of light and shadow, people walking down the street, and shots which try to unveil the humour in everyday life. It’s like I’m having an existential crisis. So I was thinking: what’s the meaning of street photography?
To understand and connect
Then two words appear – ‘understand’ and ‘connect’. They are some of the biggest lessons we need to learn as social beings, from the individual to groups, from his own habitat to the society at large. Only when we understand these things and try to connect with them, can we start to develop genuine respect and appreciation to self, other people, and surroundings. Street photography, becomes a medium for the above actions, and it applies on a personal and broader level.
Get out of the comfort zone and observe
Street photography has helped me to go to places I don’t go often or even dislike, and start to be more connected to my hometown. While I’m a curious person, I’m painfully aloof and picky when it comes to choosing places for relaxation and fun. And I’m not really connected to the surroundings, only living in my own little bubble. There are places I find them ‘boring’, ‘too crowded’, or ‘not pretty enough’. But street photography changed that. I start to explore different places in my hometown just because I want to take more beautiful photos and don’t want to stick to the same places over and over again. And though it sounds really cliché, I discover the beauty of these places, and understand the appeal of them. Note that there’s no instant or profound change of my mind, these are still not my top 5 places when it comes to spending time in weekends, but the art form gives me the willingness to get out of comfort zone, observe and understand the unfamiliar.
Foster comprehensive cultural discourse with the power of collective
And on a broader level, street photography helps enrich the conversation on culture and places. Here I think about how it can complement travel photography and documentary photography to help us understand the world. Travel photography is about showcasing the best of a place to attract travellers and tourists, often forming viewers’ first impression of a specific place. Documentary photography deals with current affairs and exposes unknown social issues that needs to be paid attention to. Street photography can somewhat cover the above two genres, but in a more flexible and expressive way, depending on the photographer’s intention, location and approach. A quick search for street photography on Instagram will lead you to millions of images in various styles, from poignant to humorous, from the quiet banal scenes of small towns to the bustle of metropolis. These serve as firsthand documentation of the lives of the common men with a personal touch, complementing the more ‘official’ or ‘serious’ documentation, making understanding of a place more comprehensively. I believe in the power of the collective, the more diverse interpretation and depiction of daily lives of different people, the better we can view others and appreciate one another. We don’t even have to ‘like’ all the ways of living in order to respect and understand why other people live in a certain way. We just need to acknowledge the co-existence and give spaces to each other, and know that we’re somehow connected as social beings. And that I think, is what street photography means to me.
