Street Photography Research

In the feedback I received to Assignment Two, my tutor recommended I also look at the following street photographers:

• Joel Sternfeld
• Stephen Shore
• Saul Leiter
• William Eggleston
• Helen Levitt.

Joel Sternfeld

Sternfeld's website doesn't appear to work, so I had to look around through google images and so on.  No doubting the artistic qualities of Sternfeld's images, but the people shots looked posed to me, not candid.  To me this makes the photographs more documentary than street.  To understand them, I would therefore need some context about their story, why they were being photographed, connection with their environment.  Not really what I'm looking for in street photography.  

Stephen Shore

To research Shore, I looked at his website.  Now I'm confused, I wouldn't describe this as Street Photography either, although the American Surfaces images could be.  I did like the Israel/West Bank series though, as having read the book Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas, which documents his journey along the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank, and have been wondering what it would be like to repeat the exercise and document the differences in people's lives.

Saul Leiter

I am familiar with Leiter, in fact, Matt Stuart once said that one of my images of Piccadilly Circus looked like one of his :)  (see https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisonadcock/14045898482/), which is nice!

Leiter, who started out as a fashion photographer, was a great pioneer of colour and abstract Street Photography;  he does not seem to have his own site, and sadly he passed away in 2013.  So I turned to lensculture magazine for material to look at.  I like these images; I particularly like Snow (1960) published in The Guardian in his obituary article: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/29/saul-leiter.  I love the colour, condensation, sense of cold, simple palette, sense of fleeting moment; and you can see this influence in Nick Turpin's recent work "Through a Glass Darkly", beautiful but calm and peaceful images.  

William Eggleston

Eggleson's own website doesn't show his images.  I saw a couple of other articles and got the sense that he was a great pioneer of colour photography also (how many pioneers do we need?) but in the end, I turned to Eric Kim's Photography blog for some information.   Like Kim, I looked at the pictures of seemingly banal everyday subjects and wondered what....?  I can see the lessons are important, photograph where you live etc, I tried this with Feltham, my local neighbourhood, both for the Bleeding London project (which I got really tired of) and Assignment One.  I didn't like doing it.  I want to make images that are funny, confusing, perplexing, even surreal, but not banal and everyday.

Helen Levitt

Briefly looking at Google images before I tried to find a specific website, and I saw instantly that her work is more akin to what I can relate to, and bears similarities to that of Vivian Meier.  Also sadly no longer with us, and not having a website of her own, I turned again to lensculture magazine to an article entitled New York Streets 1938 to 1990 showing both her black and white image and super saturated colour shots.  The image of the girl by the green car taken in New York in 1970 I had seen before at the Question of Colour exhibition at Somerset House a couple of years ago.  I like her work and have put Slide Show on my Amazon wishlist!  I think that looking at a collection of Street Photography that has built up over a period of time is very interesting - it shows society, history, culture and change.
Websites:

• 10 Lessons William Eggleston Has Taught Me About Street Photography in Eric Kim Photography available from http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/04/01/10-lessons-william-eggleston-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/ [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Helen Levitt: New York Streets 1938 to 1990s in lensculture magazine available from https://www.lensculture.com/articles/helen-levitt-helen-levitt-new-york-streets-1938-to-1990s [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Nick Turpin: Through a Glass Darkly available from http://nickturpin.com/portfolio/winter-bus/ [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Saul Leiter: 1950-60s color and black-and-white in lensculture magazine available from  https://www.lensculture.com/articles/saul-leiter-saul-leiter-1950-60s-color-and-black-and-white [accessed 25 January 2015]
• Saul Leiter Obituary in The Guardian available from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/29/saul-leiter [accessed 25 January 2015] 
• Stephen Shore available from http://stephenshore.net/index.php [accessed 25 January 2015]

Own work referred to:

• Cartier Bresson: A Question of Colour 11/11/2012 in Alison Adcock Scrapbook blog (as part of TAOP) available from http://jointheaascrapbook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/cartier-bresson-question-of-colour.html [accessed 25 January 2014]