Making the world strange again

 "Making the world strange again" is how somebody (I forget who) described the point of photography.

This could be the manifesto of 'in-Public', the street photographers group, whose members have "the ability to see the unusual in the everyday."

Street photography is the (usually) unposed catching of life, as it happens, in public places. It depends upon two of Szarkowski elements that define photography: timing and the frame. By careful, and often spontaneous framing and split-second timing, the results can be odd, with disparate elements juxtaposing with each other to create new relationships and meanings. The result is an image that is based upon a real situation, but the photograph itself is not real.

http://www.in-public.com/

Street photography historically has a politically leftish, humanistic point of view, often aiming to undermine whatever the dominant ideology might be; and so it makes full use of street signs, advertising, incongruous juxtapositions and so on to subvert their messages. 
An early  example is Andre Kertesz - http://photography-now.net/andre_kertesz/index.html 
who was an influence on the more famous Henri Cartier Bresson http://photography-now.net/henri_cartier_bresson/portfolio1.html
Robert Doisneau http://photography-now.net/robert_doisneau/portfolio1.html 
and March Riboud - http://www.marcriboud.com/marcriboud/accueil.html 
The work of the these French photographers in particular is quite beautiful, and a sense of composition and aesthetics is important, and is made explicit in Cartier Bresson's 'decisive moment'. He was also consciously surrealist in his earlier photography.
In later years, American street photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz reacted against the HCB decisive moment and its elegant composition, trying to make pictures that conveyed the visual confusion and anarchic surrealism of the street, using colour photography before colour was accepted as an appropriate medium for serious photographers. 
The rulebook of photography (not that there is anything like a rulebook) was rewritten by Robert Frank in the 50s with the publication of his book, The Americans. You can often make a correspondence between significant photographers and writers or musicians, and it makes sense that Jack Kerouac wrote the forward to this book, because his own On the Road with its loose, lively beatnik sensibility is the verbal equivalent of Robert Frank's take on America.
Some good newspaper articles about it here and here. "With their murky backgrounds and blurred figures, many of Frank's pictures seem as if they were snapped on the sly to expose things normally hidden. In his case, however, the secrets are the kind that lie in plain sight. His photos reveal the darkness people usually pretend isn't there because they don't want to look."
In relation to our discussion about the ethics of photographing people in public places, there is probably quite a lot in Frank's pictures and in his approach that could make us feel uncomfortable. They certainly made people uncomfortable when they were published, and Life magazine said they made America look like Russia, which was a severe criticism. However he was saying, with his picture essay, something important that needed to be said about America, the reality and the self-image; something that made a significant contribution to visual culture. All societies need this: to see ourselves as others see us.
This, I think, is what photography can do and what photographers are entitled to do as part of living in a democratic society: we are entitled to use our chosen medium to comment upon and engage with our own society and environment. This is an important principle, that comes under pressure from a variety of directions. For example, photography is discouraged in many shopping malls and in my opinion this is because the owners of these centres do not want anything to interfere with the commercial activity, or anything to interrupt the selling message. Photography - particularly serious photography - often undermines and pokes fun at that message.


A few people have said on courses like this one, that they wish to move on from pictorial or picturesque images, or to make work that is more creative. One approach is to develop the understanding that photography can be critical, it can be subversive, it can be challenging and opinionated and unpopular, and it can be impolite. The results are not always pretty. This applies equally to landscape and portraiture as it does to street and documentary.