Stockland Martel

During his presentation at the APA/NY Image Makers lecture last week, Jeff Mermelstein noted that his work is typically identified as street photography but that he doesn’t think of it that way. He considers it photojournalism. And then he said, “I think Garry Winogrand is one of the greatest photojournalists.”

I thought about this assertion as I read Sean O’Hagan’s excellent feature on street photography in Britain’s The Observer this past Sunday.

“Back in the 1960s, when New York was the centre of street photography, the main practitioners of the form would sometimes cross paths. Lee Friedlander was friends with Garry Winogrand who often met Joel Meyerowitz as they crisscrossed Manhattan and beyond on the prowl for pictures that caught the city’s tempo, its myriad everyday dramas, and its citizens at work and at play,” O’Hagan writes.

Capturing a city’s tempo and dramas and its citizens at work and play—yeah, that does sound like photojournalism. Especially when you consider this quote from Winogrand cited in O’Hagan’s article:

“When I’m photographing, I see life,” Winogrand once said. “That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head… I don’t worry about how the picture is going to look. I let that take care of itself… It’s not about making a nice picture. That anyone can do.”

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Click on the image to access The Observer's street-photography online gallery.

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The future of this particular brand of photojournalism, however, is in question, says  O’Hagan in “Why Street Photography Is Facing a Moment of Truth.” These days, the aggressive approach of renowned photographers like Winogrand and Bruce Gilden “would, before long, get you arrested or beaten up.”

“It would be even more difficult to take street photographs the way the more gentle practitioners of the form did,” O’Hagan continues. “Both Britain’s Roger Mayne, working in the 1950s and 1960s, and America’s Helen Levitt, who famously began shooting in colour in New York in the early 60s, often photographed children at play in the streets and never thought twice about it. Neither did the children’s parents or guardians. That is not the case any more. We live in an age of anxieties, both big and small, real and imagined.”

But the story isn’t just about the new logistical difficulties of being a street photographer; O’Hagan also touches on how street photography is perceived in the fine-art world and among critics, the issue of whether post-production has a place in this genre, and the long shadow cast by masters like Levitt, Winogrand, et al. It’s definitely worth a close read.

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