In the last few years the definition "street photography" has been erroneously used mainly in connection with street style photographers. Yet, while fashion is a dimension of street photography, this form of art has many ramifications and can be diversified in different branches.
A documentary released yesterday on Vimeo tries to set the record straight by exploring the real world of street photography, revealing the unique vision of different iconic figures who transformed through their cameras the banality of everyday life into lasting epiphanies.
Directed by photographer and documentarian Cheryl Dunn and produced by Lucy Cooper, "Everybody Street" covers nine decades of street photography through several interviews and an extensive selection of haunting, intriguing, romantic, or simply disquieting and shocking yet inspiring images.
The documentary opens with Joel Meyerowitz who recounts how he quit his job as art director to become a street photograher caught in a perennial search for instant gestures, or key moments in time that could reveal something crucial about the person pictured or about life and culture in general.
Each photographer interviewed is unique: Belgrade-born Boogie started photographing as a process to preserve his sanity when war erupted in his home country but soon turned this medium into a reason for living and a way to gain access to the unseen lives of junkies and gangsters, outcasts and outsiders.
Jill Freedman's works and her images of cops and firefighters in New York, are suspended between sociology and anthropology, while, hooked on street life, Bruce Gilden, sees the people he photographs as physical symbols of his own vision, and Bruce Davidson, like a reborn Dante with a camera, developed a passion for getting down into the bowels of the subway at bizarre times of the morning to capture unusual glimpses of life.
The photographers are obviously the main protagonists of the documentary, but their subjects and the streets of New York, are definitely the co-protagonists. New York City bursts with energy and dynamism, but also with extreme danger, elements that the photographers featured in the documentary take into account and use at their advantage.
Martha Cooper's images for example have an ethnographic value about them as they portray street kids in derelict and abandoned areas, or trains covered in graffiti crossing the Bronx (Cooper has a special eye for "matching" a train with the proper background).
Dunn also interviewed historian Max Kozloff who provides feedback about further iconic photographers such as Lisette Model, whose images often feature dark figures looming in the background; Diane Arbus who had a penchant for photographic subjects with something freakish about them; renegade photographer William Klein, and Robert Frank, well-known for his "hard-boiled" images.
Through an interview with Rebecca Lepkoff "Everybody Street" also recounts the history of the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers active in New York between 1936 and 1951, whose work revolved around a range of common social and creative causes.
Indeed, as Clayton Patterson states in the film, a photographer does not work as an individual but as a part of the community, a point also proved by Jamel Shabazz's images of crews and posses, homeless people and prostitutes.
Some part of the documentaries raise concerns about various issues from the fact that very few photographers are taking pictures on film, as Jeff Mermelstein explains, to the future of photography and the lack of genuine documentary work.
Elliott Erwitt talks about digital manipulation killing photography, remarking that, despite the fact that innovative digital means have made it easier to take pictures, the final results aren't necessarily good ones.
Mary Ellen Mark highlights instead the fact that we have stopped appreciating reality, though the most powerful photographs around chronicle real life.
Mark has a point: our perceptions of reality are in constant change and we continuously produce more and more images on a daily basis, often turning into exibitionists as we share even our most intimate moments on social networks, or transforming into fakers and image surgeons on our endless quests to create a perfect portrait of our own selves.
These street photographers show instead that a real picture is the result of a perfect mix of surprise (it is by chance that photographer Ricky Powell bumps into Basquiat and Andy Warhol), creativity, improvisation, quick reactions, a pinch of good luck and, above all, an unquenchable thirst for life.
"Everybody Street" is not a definitive history of street photography, but a manifesto for street photographers, a compelling film about the only medium in our life capable of freezing time, and a documentary that may teach us to look a bit better at the world and the people surrounding us.
"Everybody Street" is on at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema today, and on 16 and 17 November 2013 (check out this link for further screenings); you can rent/buy and download "Everybody Street" (available also with several bonus interviews) from Vimeo.
All screenshots in this post are taken from "Everybody Street" directed by Cheryl Dunn.
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