Intro
Today everyone is a photographer. Take a look around you? I’m sure you can find someone to your right and to your left with a camera slung around their neck, over their shoulder. Everyone is taking photographs. Worse still, people are flocking to street photography as if it is some kind of new sliced bread. Must be easy, right? I mean you just grab a camera and hit the street and start clicking away, right? No studio needed. No complicated equipment, models or model releases, or technical training required. Anyone can be a street photographer! I suppose that’s true, in some sense anyhow. Yes, anyone can be a street photographer, provided that’s all there is to it. But, it seems that’s not all there is to it. There is more. It may be subtlety nuanced, but there is more. Your photos must be unique and they must be different. You have to say something, as a photographer, that has not been said before. Otherwise your snapshots become just a few more pixels in the zillions and zillions already out there in nowhere. Being different is hard. It’s all been done, right? Yes. Well no, not exactly. We all draw upon influences and the people who came before us. But the aim is to add something to that “school” which makes it new and furthers its trajectory within the arts. My work has a distinct signature that is mine. It’s not easy. My only advice is this: Buy as many photography books as you can afford. Spend money on books and not gear. Look at the work you like and think about how you can contribute to this genre in order that your work would be noticed.