Street Photography - An Introduction

Excuse me, I am a street photographer. You look very pretty, may I take your picture?

- A TikToker, whilst documenting the most fake process imaginable and then proceeding to sacrilegiously dub it as "Street Photography."

Street photography has nothing to do with any of that. It's an art. You don't "ask for permission" to do art. Speaking of which, asking permission might just be the most misunderstood concept since quantom physics. As long as I don't make any profit from these photos, or plan to do anything malicious with them, I have every right in the world to take a photo in a public space—Unless I'm in North Korea, or even worse, Paris. As apparently those smelly frenchman have oddly specific laws to when it comes to taking pictures in their urinary capital.

As far as I'm concerned, I snapped a photo and you just happened to be there. If something, I should harrass you for ruining MY picture with YOUR ugly mug!

Pardon my militance, my passion got me carried me away. In reality, it's not that deep. Instead of reading my whining, you should just watch this video:

This was one of the videos that convinced me to take my hobby of taking unsolicited photos of other people, something I've been doing since my days in middle school—to the wreath of all my friends, a bit more seriously.
Trevor Wisecup, the guy in the video, is obviously a good kid. You can tell he's a good kid. His mannerisms, the way he conducts himself, even the way he responded when that douchebag @31:55 minute mark got all up in his face. Which makes him a perfect example to that side of the street photography spectrum.

As for the other side of that spectrum, enter Bruce Gilden:

Ugly, vulgar, and in your face. If Tommy Wisecup, bless his heart, would be the goody-two-shoes of street photography, Bruce Gilden would be on the exact opposite side of that spectrum.

Nonetheless, both are two sides of the same coin. Two examples of a very wide array of an art.
I obviously can't pretend to have anything near the amount of skill these guys have. Heck, all of the photos here (unless mentioned otherwise) were taken on my humble Samsung Galaxy.

Anyways, enough yapping, here are some highlights of my 'work'. You will be able to find these and many more, all with annotations and backstories, in the subsequent blog posts.

Notation System / The Legend

A quick note on a system that will accompany all posts of this sort, not this one, incidently. I do not wish this to be a showcase of my best moments, but a documentation of all my moments. A journal, not a gallery.

Then, how do we diffrentiate between the good and the bad? I decided to appropriate the tried and tested chess notation:

!! - A genius photo.
! - A good photo.
!? - An interesting photo that is thought-provoking.
? - A lacking photo that leaves something to be desired.
?? - A bad picture.
No notation usually means I find the picture to be average or OK at best. A fate arguabely worse than being a “bad picture.”

Needless to say, these are all my opinion, and may change with time. I urge anyone who disagrees to reach out and share their opinion. With out further ado, here are some examples of my work.

Remember: you can click on the images to zoom in!