Let me ask you a question.
Why is it that there is no contemporary Street Photography held in the collections of major museums and galleries in the UK?
Tate Gallery? No. Victoria & Albert? No. Museum of London? No. National Media Museum Bradford? No.
The aquisition of Street Photography at these institutions ended with Tony Ray Jones, Roger Mayne and Paul Trevor twenty years or more ago. Perhaps the answer is a financial one, perhaps it is a matter of fashions or perhaps it is simply that in the UK we still haven't reached the point, as happened in America decades ago, where photographers working with small handheld cameras are taken seriously. A whole generation of young British Photographers have spent the last decade recording life on the streets of London and the UK completely unrecognised and unsupported by its institutions and curators. They've worked unfunded, with no grants or bursaries and yet their images represent a valuable candid record of British society that no UK gallery or museum has acknowledged, shown or bought.
Nils Jorgensen, London.
Nick Turpin, London.
Matt Stuart, London.
David Solomons, London.
Stephen McLaren, London.
Paul Russell, Bournemouth.
Adrian Fisk, London.
David Gibson, London.
Kate Hooper, London.
Maciej Dakowicz, Cardiff.
I can't help thinking that if the work of this generation of Street Photographers fails to end up in a national collection, then someone somewhere is not doing their job.
Still no Street Photography
July 22nd, 2010
22 Responses to “Still no Street Photography”
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July 22nd, 2010 - 1:58 pm
Sad thing in general. One reason might be – I can imagine for Germany or Austria – the thing with personal picture rights. As a street photographer in these countries you are always working with one leg in the illegal zone. No museum or gallery is interested in having difficulties with photographers who are now or later on involved in legal disputes caused by injured personal picture rights.
July 22nd, 2010 - 2:57 pm
You may be right in those countries Kay but in the UK we have never had those legal issues with photographing and exhibiting images of the public. Also many UK galleries already have this work in their collections such as the Roger Mayne Southam Street pictures that the V&A hold.
I think the reason in the UK is a more interesting and subtle one.
July 23rd, 2010 - 1:33 pm
The same reason good music doesn’t win Grammies. Large institutions are always years behind the pulse of what is happening. No sense complaining. It’s in their nature.
July 24th, 2010 - 3:07 pm
“The same reason good music doesn’t win Grammies”
Well said Blake.
July 26th, 2010 - 8:40 am
Such true words, the street is for me were the essence of the people and of a nation.
It is not given the respect it should.
Its a shame,
James
July 27th, 2010 - 6:37 am
Hello Nick.
To be honest, I don’t care about gallery, because of one reason;
as Kay said; “we working with one leg in the illegal zone”, that also mean that we have to make some kind of special presentation our work.
Don’t go to the gallery, whit pictures, wich are about people in the city space.
I think that we have our big and non-limited gallery outside the buildings!
Street – this is the answer!
I start to preparing my own presentation in the small city where I live.
Every picture ( I planned 30 photos ) will stand in the place where these pictures where taken. Under every photo you can find small map which show you four directs and you can choose wherever you want to go and you will find another photo, and so on.
This is my idea. What do you think Nick?
Ps. Sorry for my terrible english, my spoken language is far better and more comunicative
July 27th, 2010 - 8:49 pm
The common, the banal and the straightforward, are at the core of the young street photographers explorations.
Big art institutions are terrified by the banal. To justify their presence and funding, they need to show and promote pretentious high art.
July 28th, 2010 - 7:25 pm
The lack of acknowledgement is sad indeed. Even sadder is the longer it goes on the more chance there is of work being left in limbo that could have been picked up once upon a time. 20 years or more and counting as you said yourself
July 29th, 2010 - 4:39 am
Nick, I’ll turn the question back on you.
Why is it important that street photography be recognized by the art world?
July 29th, 2010 - 2:00 pm
@Karmazyniello Sounds great good luck with the project. We don’t ‘need’ the galleries to reach an audience you are right but we should not be excluded for the wrong reasons.
@Zisis I think you make a good point, these institutions see those of us working in public with small handheld cameras as good enthusiasts, there are no John Szarkowski’s among the staff of our museums and galleries who are enlightened enough to recognise the important record that these young photographers are making. (Don’t misunderstand that to mean I think any of us are Winogrands).
@JB I agree I think to buy this work is to support its being made and to support the young artists that are out their making it.
@B I don’t think the institutions I mention are really art world, but they are national museums of record, they hold national collections which is a slightly different thing. For them to buy the work of contemporary street photographers would be to recognise that it is an important and current genre. Not to buy that work and represent it in their collections would be to neglect their responsibilities to history.
July 29th, 2010 - 2:33 pm
I’m a US citizen, so I only know the institutions you list by name and reputation. What’s their record for acquiring contemporary artists in other styles or genres?
As far as the state of things in the US, I will definitely agree that American institutions do have significant collections of various street photographers (such at the current Leon Levinstein exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York), but I don’t know that they’re any more contemporary than the 70s and 80s either. At least I haven’t seen anything newer than that myself. It really seems like any new work that big museums buy is only from long-practicing artists, in which case it hardly seems to address the problem you recognized.
Of course, this is all unresearched impressions, so I could be way off base.
July 29th, 2010 - 8:57 pm
I try to answer your question with some words that photographer Joel Meyerowitz sent to me by mail…I think that he has an interesting point of view, and it seems that there is a global problem in relation to this kind of photography.
«I don’t know the answer to this question. I have been doing this kind of work since 1962 and it has always met with a certain degree of resistance, mainly because the personal poetry we make does not seem to have an application to “news, fashion, editorial, etc.”»
«Just imagine that when I was young, back in my twenties in the 1960’s, there was no respect for this kind of photography, no galleries, no museums to show it, no magazines that really wanted more young photographers because back then they were beginning the slide into their own self destruction, so it was a hopeless time, and the only thing that kept any of us going was the love of the medium»
In my opinion street photography will acquire his great value only after many years, when became a sort of great reportage of situations and lifestyles of the past.
July 30th, 2010 - 4:56 am
Hasn’t street photography been done? Shouldn’t we move on to other stuff?
July 30th, 2010 - 12:52 pm
I am of the opinion that the recording of public life is never ‘done’, that’s like suggesting that photography is done. As I wrote here: http://tinyurl.com/3xjrzqd
“Our obsession with innovating the medium and experimenting with it has only taught of its limitations and I believe there is now a generation of photographers who understand that and are eager to work in that sweet spot where photography simply does what it does best. SFMOMA in April held a summit titled ‘Is Photography Over’ but the photography they seemed to be referring to was the photography that deals with itself, the navel gazing ‘What photography is, does, and means?’ kind of photography. I think the photographers that will now take the stage are those that realise photography is just the tool and is not in fact the subject. In many ways the best photographs I know, the ones with the emotional punch in the stomach, the ones that make my mind whurr trying to enter their psychological space are not the over intellectual creations of art course graduates but unretouched works of instinct by photographers who release the shutter when their heart jumps through their chest. If you need to stand up in front of a projected slide of your work explaining it for twenty minutes or if I need to read an essay about your intent before viewing it then you’ve failed to understand what photography is good at…for you ‘Photography Is Over’.”
Paul Graham admits we are in a “Post Documentary Photographic World” ( http://tinyurl.com/yfgm2le ) but like me laments the lack of recognition given by institutions to ’straight’ photography, a category in which Street Photography certainly takes a central place:
“what of those who work today with equal commitment and sincerity, using straight photography in the cacophonous present? I will not name names here, but for these serious photographers the fog of time still obfuscates their efforts, and the blindness j’accuse some of the art world of suffering from, narrows their options. It means their work will almost never be considered for Documenta, or placed alongside other artists in a Biennale, or found for sale in major contemporary art galleries and art fairs. This does not just deprive the public of the work, and the work of its place, it denies these artists the self-confidence that enables them to grow, to feel appreciation and affirmation, not to mention some modest financial reward allowing them to continue to work. It is also, most importantly, seeing the world of visual art in narrow terms.”
Of course Street Photography suffers its cliches but then what photography genre doesn’t?
July 30th, 2010 - 2:33 pm
I wonder if street photography’s difficulty being accepted isn’t a function of what it is. A lot of the conversations about art that I hear these days focus on Intent – what the artist means to do. I think that idea reached its apex in the Conceptual Art movement of the 60s, where the Intent was all that the artist provided and the actual result was pretty much left to chance.
Street photography works completely differently. The only intent I have when I go out shooting is to be open to the world in front of me and to try to catch a bit of it on film. Nothing so grand as “documenting migrant farm workers” or “illustrating the effect media representations on female body image in the 21st Century” or any of those other artist’s statement-type pieces that I’ve seen. If there’s one thing I’ve found to be true of the modern art world, it’s that the story matters as much as the work, if not more. Perhaps street photographers, by virtue of not having a “good enough story” to tell, will always have trouble fitting in to the art world.
As far as whether street photography has “been done,” I don’t even understand the question. It’s only been done as much as photojournalism has been done. Existence is not static. Life still happens. Maybe when every possible combination of people, places, and things has been shot, we can call street photography done, but until then I don’t see how it could ever be.
July 30th, 2010 - 3:59 pm
@Pete That’s an interesting point, certainly people always want to know what a set of pictures are ‘about’. I have argued that a good Street Photograph can be a self contained story, it need not be one facet of a larger narrative….the Meyerowitz image of the Fallen Man in Paris that I used in my PUBLICATION essay is a good example of that I think > http://tinyurl.com/39qebud .
Its true that the Street Photography projects you remember are often arranged around a subject which does run counter to one of the basic premises of Street Photography, that you are working without preconception. I am working on a book project in France at the moment, its Street Photography in my mind but already I find myself covering off aspects of French life, my Street Photographers openness to all comers has been compromised a little….but people now ask me ‘how is the French project coming on?’, already its become a memorable item simply by having a subject and a little intent.
August 1st, 2010 - 4:39 am
This makes me wonder if the Stills Gallery in Sydney might in fact be fairly unique (outside the US) in regularly exhibiting street photography.
August 2nd, 2010 - 7:44 am
Hello to all,
I thought it was the opposite in UK. Well all those ideas and discussions were nice to hear. In my own country street photography term is new even..
hello from istanbul,
Ilker
August 3rd, 2010 - 8:02 pm
Nick,
Gotta hand it to you that it was a great idea for you to open this debate about street photography and modern art. We are still a huge niche…but our art definitely should be as highly regarded as any other types of art or photography.
Keep up the great thoughts. I am a huge fan of your photography and writing.
Best,
Eric
August 4th, 2010 - 9:21 pm
@Pete. I think you’re hitting something with the story concept. The people I know who really label and promote themselves as artists always seem to have some grand message behind their bodies of works. I don’t think I have ever once thought that is that is what being an artist is, that I want to be one. I used to irritate the hell out of one of my photography teachers in college because I was insistent that I didn’t have a message behind any set of images. “I see everyday life as being the strangest thing out there, and want to show it to you” never seemed to fly.
It sucks that contemporary work is underrepresented, but we just need to keep slugging at it if we’re passionate about it. Once the hairstyles and car designs change enough, people will start wanting it.
August 5th, 2010 - 4:45 am
I wouldn’t entirely agree that combined the institutions you mention are exterior to the art world, as their remit would be to collect an overview of significant works, vernacular (both commercial and amateur) and artistic that are currently being produced, and to fill in any gaps that appear as history is “rewritten”. The street work of Tony Ray Jones for example is as much a part of the history of British photographic art as it is a record of the Britain in the 60’s. That historical progression I would argue, leads us to photographers like Stephen Gill, whose billboard series incidentally is represented in the V&A collection. Is this work arguably not contemporary street photography?
With respect Nick, I would argue that your definition of street photography, or at least the one you have up on In Public, is out of date. Literally as it is now 10 years old, but also in its restrictive approach to defining something that is as heterogeneous as the nature of the urban space it records.
Why can’t a street photographer “leave the house in the morning with an agenda” why must they by-pass thought, experience a loss of “self” and be in such a rush that they can’t change a lens in case they miss the shot. You argue that street photographers are motivated by an “overwhelming obsession with the moment selected to make the exposure”.
I would argue that many contemporary “street photographers” are engaged in a discussion that turns its back on the decisive moment and questions the whole principle of a hierarchy of moments. How can we say one moment is correct? How can the photographer detach themselves from their “self” and still show empathy.
I have great respect for your work and think it a shame that none of your colleague’s photographs are held in these UK collections, it is indeed an omission. But I believe that descriptors such as “street photographer” are divisive and like many photographers who work “using straight photography in the cacophonous present” tend not to immediately associate with the term.
August 7th, 2010 - 5:31 pm
This is a fascinating discussion, and quite naturally, I do believe that the work of great contemporary street photographers should be included in the collections of galleries everywher — and I cannot understand why it isn’t.
I’m personally not concerned about defining street photography very strictly, myself. I just do what I do with the camera in the street, and am always thrilled to see excellent street shots, as the ones above in this post.
Let good street photography continue to be made… and let it be seen!