Today’s street photographers are making serious work and finding audiences, but the structures that help them keep making, publishing, and living from that work remain thin.
Maybe the question to ask is does street photography as a genre have an audience. The canon as you call it is made of well known pictures that were published and printed again and again in the traditional medias and got an iconic status. Nowadays every picture published through the unique media of the Internet (be it Instagram or whatever other means) will just be even or 'near equal'. Maybe something (somebody) will emerge from this uniqueness, even-ness in the future, but most likely not from the traditional ways of being recognized (books, art galleries, etc). Thank you for sharing this great article.
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts and aspirations. Well written and fully agree on chasing emotions and impact and not be misguided by social media.
Good article, and I'm curious to see what comes next. What you describe is a problem I've been thinking about a lot recently. I love photobooks and practice street photography myself, but I'm mostly unwilling to engage with contemporary street photography unless it's from a well-known photographer with multiple projects. The noise level is just too high, and quite honestly, I've found that most street photography is chasing aesthetics rather than saying something.
When I take a risk on an art photography photobook (portraiture, still life, landscape), even the bad ones are books I'll pick up again. With bad street photography books, they feel rushed or incomplete. They're the ones I tend to give away or donate because I don't want to revisit them. Because of that, I'm much less willing to take a chance on new street photography books than other genres.
In general, I feel the bar is much higher for street photography than other genres precisely because the medium is so accessible. That's what creates the noise problem in the first place.
Thanks Timothy! The noise problem is real and I can see how it shapes the way the genre gets perceived. What I'd add is that the bar gets high for individual books partly because the layer that would normally help readers take risks on a new book (think critics and editorial platforms) is quite thin in street photography compared to other genres. So the burden falls on each book to prove itself cold (a tough ask!). I'm planning to get directly into this in the next essay. Curious to hear what you think when it's up.
Beautifully written. Vocalized what so many photographers and artists in general feel.
Been having institutional acclaim and exhibitions in Cleveland for my street photography for some years now — In the early days, there were moments of thinking “will anybody care about this while I’m alive?” The grant and gallery space is so complex. Truly knowing who your work is for is tough, assuming you ever even figure out your own voice.
Street photography has this unique challenge, like you alluded to, of being contemporary and historical, structural and spontaneous. Art is rarely easy, but as we move into the future, I too hope that the web of support grows for this precious craft, nurturing folks while they can still smell the flowers.
Thank you, Doriyan. I really appreciate this. Your point about institutional acclaim still not necessarily helping the work find a sustained audience feels very important. I’m hoping to think more in the next essay about what kinds of structures help work circulate beyond the exhibition or grant context. In your experience, has grant or gallery support helped your work keep reaching people after the exhibition ends, or does that remain the harder part?
For me, my two artist residences have fantastic for community building. Both have had strong educational focuses, so that’s rewarding in its own right.
My exhibitions have been publicized, so they’ve had net positive, yet unquantifiable impact to overall visibility. Every art institution I’ve worked with has wonderful people who champion their artists. Have certainly had things come across my desk where I know a collaborator recommended me for the opportunity.
Overall, however, I’d say most of my visibility has come from my own work on YouTube, Substack, etc.
That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like institutions can create important moments of visibility and connection, but the longer work of keeping an audience around the work still often falls back on the artist. That distinction is exactly what I’m trying to think through. Thank you for sharing this.
Great read and very interesting. As a burgeoning street photographer, it is no wonder that my mentor and others have negated my ideas of making any monies through the genre. I think this mindset discourages probably some truly great up and comers from pursuing their passion, which is sad. I for one am not seeking game or fortune, but to just simple make good photographs. A book would be nice, yes, but not the end-all.
A lot of what you’re saying resonates, but I do think you’re missing something that’s pretty significant. The books by established photographers that you mention are successful and memorable because of the quality of the work; these photographers all have a unique visual signature, they all know the difference between a good picture and a bad picture and more importantly which of those they should share, and which should go in the trash. I work in New York City and there are a tremendous amount of street photographers here. But there are very few whose work is singular, distinctly recognizable as their own, and of obvious consistent quality. The democratization that social media brought photography, and specifically street photography, has exponentially increased the amount of work that’s out in the public eye, but there are a few filters to separate good work from bad work. And many street photographers are working because of their enthusiasm for the genre, without a background of understanding about what has been done before or what constitutes good work. “Good Work” on social media could mean a photograph that gets a lot of likes - but remove that same photograph from the social outlet, place it in a venue that has more traditional criteria for weighing the merit of a photographers work, and the work quickly falls apart. Perhaps I’m naïve, perhaps I’m being either too optimistic or cynical, I’m not sure: but I believe as always in artistic pursuits, work that is valid will eventually emerge, while trends will fall away. If someone is doing truly excellent work, eventually they will be recognized. Unfortunately, that is never on a timetable that is pleasing for us as artists. But if you look at the history of art, that’s the way it’s always been. If I make something I like, that’s enough for me. External validation is elusive and always has been. In a world that could completely reject the paintings of Van Gogh during his lifetime, why should we expect that a photograph of someone eating a meatball sandwich in Bryant Park at golden hour will get anyone’s attention? Just do the work and keep getting better and don’t stop.
Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate a bit of disagreement here!
First, I agree that quality matters and having a unique signature as a photographer matters. Several readers have pointed out that a lot of work online may not have a lot of depth, and I actually just wrote a new essay about that (see The Best Street Photos Don't Win Contests). Where we diverge is "do the work and it will eventually emerge."
Take Alex Webb. I'd argue he's exactly the singular, consistent photographer you're describing. The Suffering of Light is still talked about fifteen years on, but not because the pictures rose on their own. Aperture published it, Magnum represented him, it stayed in print, it kept getting written about, it landed on syllabi and shelves. Strip those away and even that book loses its audience. The quality was necessary, but I'd argue that even for a book like this it isn't sufficient. Webb had the work and the whole apparatus around it. Photographers of the current generation do the work (and there's good work that even gets published) but they don't have anything that supports the afterlife of the book (assuming they manage to get published in the first place).
Second, I'd gently turn the Van Gogh example around. I think he's actually the clearest case of work not emerging on its own. Yes, he died unrecognized. But what made his work surface and gave it such an incredible afterlife is that his sister-in-law spent decades placing the paintings and building the record.
So I'm with you on "keep getting better and don't stop." I just don't think the rest takes care of itself. And that's the part I find most important: not just diagnosing the gap but asking what we can actually do about it. Whether that's a journal that reviews these books seriously and systematically, or reprinting good work to keep it in circulation, or even something as simple as donating books to libraries so they stay findable. I don't have an answer yet, and I plan to dig into it in a future essay because it's one thing to diagnose a problem, and quite another to work out what can actually be done about it.
Thanks for the response and it’s so wonderful to have some thoughtful & friendly back-and-forth, Vica!
Perhaps I sounded a little bit too flippant in my initial response - I didn’t mean to say that everything will take care of itself, we definitely need community and acknowledgment and most of all, luck. But I think that unless the work is good, no matter what mechanism you put around it will bring it larger success or recognition. Sure, platforms can be created that will serve as an echo chamber amongst users, one could say iRys is an example of this.
I’ve spoken to some very well-known photographers who surprised me by explaining that they had to raise 30 or $50,000 to publish a book. I’m not sure what can be done about it - there are so many problems to deal with, not the least of which is the whole AI question and what that’s going to do to the value of most creative work. The people who monetize/exploit the work of artists would love nothing more than not have to pay them and just have a computer do everything. So I think the biggest job is going to create work that differentiates itself from that which can be done by AI.
I think a realistic approach might be to create artistic collectives that present work in the real world; where people can touch the work and talk to the artists and understand the value and the craft. This has been done throughout history, and I think it’s gonna be more important now than ever to have real world human connection be a part of how art is presented and marketed. I guess we’ll find out! Thank you so much for the reply and for your thoughtful post - Jim
Thanks for thoughtfully analyzing and expressing many angles that have been plaguing me, as well (and which have similarly sent me scampering from IG in search of more rewarding environs). As a Chicagoan, I've largely resigned to leaving a trove of meaningful images in trunks and hoping for a Vivian Maier-esque post mortem discovery....
Thanks for sharing this. I hear you, but as a fellow photographer I do hope there can be other ways. What happened with Maier's work is what I'd call a miracle. From what I understand, someone bought her negatives at a storage locker auction. It could so easily not have happened, and all her work would have vanished.
But that's exactly why I started this Substack: there must be avenues beyond social media that let us share our work. Whether it's zines or books, I think that's really the best format for it. What I think we need to figure out is how we can collectively build ways to bring in grant funding, get critics to review the work, and get booksellers willing to take a chance on books outside the canon. The alternative is leaving it to posthumous luck, and I'd rather not.
In one way I am begining to think that the idea of Street photography where you only document what happens in the street/urban environment, without interacting with or knowing your subjects is also part of the problem.
Street photography is great as an art form but we do remove the other aspects of venacular photography your own every day where you use the same documentary style of photography.
If you take street style photos of the club where you do sports, of your art class, band practice, from the choire practice where you know people and interact with them. If you use the strictest definition of street photography those images are not street photography.
So do we miss something by having this strict idea of what street photography is, or perhaps this is a closely related gengre?
Jonas, this is exactly the conversation I hoped the piece would start and you've put your finger on why I called this Substack Candid and not Street. What I care about isn't the rule (strangers, public space, no interaction) but the approach: catching someone unposed, in a moment we wouldn't otherwise see. Once a photographer is working that way, I don't think it matters much whether the subject is a stranger at a market or someone they know at band practice/art class etc. The band practice picture isn't "not street photography" so much as the same sensibility pointed somewhere more intimate and often those are the ones that hold together as a book more easily, because the relationship gives them a spine.
Where I'd push back on myself, though: this line of thinking could easily result in the conclusion that "strict street photography can't carry a book." And this wouldnt be the right conclusion as plenty of it can. Alex Webb's La Calle (his Mexico work over many years, which I have on my shelf) is nothing but strangers in public, chance (and over time color is introduced), no relationship to his subjects, and it holds together as a book in a way a feed never could. The less interesting street photography isn't dull because it's of strangers, it's dull because it's single-image thinking stretched out: seven okay frames in a carousel with nothing accumulating underneath. But I think that's a social media feed problem, not a genre problem.
But honestly, you've got me thinking this really deserves a full post rather than a reply buried in the comments. There's something here about how the strictest definition of street might be part of what keeps it out of the ecosystem, while the more intimate, project-shaped work gets let in more easily. Thank you for this.
The diagnosis lands. One thing I'd add from outside the photography industry but inside the work of building things from scratch: ecosystems rarely get built by waiting for institutions to notice. They get built by the people standing in the gap, deciding to do the work no one is paying them to do. Eyeshot is one of those. This Substack, if it becomes the thing you're describing, becomes another. The infrastructure that eventually gets called an ecosystem usually started as a handful of people refusing to wait.
"A handful of people refusing to wait" is a good way to put it. I'd add one thing though: the genres that do have ecosystems (fine art, documentary, photojournalism) didn't only get built by people refusing to wait. They also got built because grants, museums, MFA programs, and foundations eventually showed up. Aperture, the Guggenheim, the Alexia, the Eugene Smith, these institutions really made a difference. Street photography has almost none of that, and I think the absence is part of what we're up against. So both, probably: people refusing to wait *and* institutions eventually deciding the work is worth supporting. The first without the second can feel/be exhausting; the second without the first never starts.
That "exhausting" lands. What I keep turning over is why the scaffolding never showed up for street the way it did for documentary or fine art — whether it's consent, or that street resists being a single prestige object the way a portrait series or war archive does. I think you're naming the right gap.
Insightful statement. I agree on all counts. I also believe that the digital democratization of street photography has made it where street photographers are "a dime a dozen." Instagram propagated the process. For those who've been practicing before the digital democratization, there may have been some possible infrastructure that could broke through to success, flooding the market with so many lookalikes feeding the algorithm is too big a Goliath to overcome given the segmentation of street photography in 2010.
About the same time this article published, Jim Roche published his article speaking to a broader photography art market, that I believe intersects with this discussion. May be worth a read.
Thank you, Kenneth, and for the link to the Jim Roche essay. He's coming at it from the gallery and art-market side, but we land in almost the same place: photography sits outside the art economy because it's reproducible, and the honest answer isn't to repair the gallery model but to build a parallel one. His section on Japan is a clear case that the photobook can be a system in itself.
On "a dime a dozen," I'll gently push back a bit, although I recognize where you are coming from. Yes, the volume is real and the algorithm rewards the lookalikes (we all have enough of photo dumps and recycled carousels, at least I do!). But I don't think that makes the Goliath unbeatable so much as it makes Instagram the wrong battlefield. The work that lasts was never going to be found by feeding the feed. That's exactly why I keep coming back to books and the structures around them: slower, but ours to build.
This is an interesting take. Ive always works thinking that genres like portraiture, street photography, landscapes, are elements that can make up a body of work. But of course each of those can be their own space for mastery.
Thank you. Yes, I agree. For many photographers, genre works more as an element than as a fixed category. The work I admire most often sits somewhere between documentary, environmental portraiture, and street.
What I was trying to get at is slightly different: even when the photographer is working across genres, the moment a book leans visibly into street photography, the publishing and grant infrastructure seems to know less easily what to do with it than work framed as, say, documentary.
So yes, the work itself may be cross genre. But the way the ecosystem receives it is not quite as flexible.
Beautifully written. And equally, really inspiring. I look forward to your next post.
Maybe the question to ask is does street photography as a genre have an audience. The canon as you call it is made of well known pictures that were published and printed again and again in the traditional medias and got an iconic status. Nowadays every picture published through the unique media of the Internet (be it Instagram or whatever other means) will just be even or 'near equal'. Maybe something (somebody) will emerge from this uniqueness, even-ness in the future, but most likely not from the traditional ways of being recognized (books, art galleries, etc). Thank you for sharing this great article.
This was a great read or listen
Thank you
I feel this is exactly the truth
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts and aspirations. Well written and fully agree on chasing emotions and impact and not be misguided by social media.
Well stated. Glad to see you on Substack and look forward to seeing more from you here.
Good article, and I'm curious to see what comes next. What you describe is a problem I've been thinking about a lot recently. I love photobooks and practice street photography myself, but I'm mostly unwilling to engage with contemporary street photography unless it's from a well-known photographer with multiple projects. The noise level is just too high, and quite honestly, I've found that most street photography is chasing aesthetics rather than saying something.
When I take a risk on an art photography photobook (portraiture, still life, landscape), even the bad ones are books I'll pick up again. With bad street photography books, they feel rushed or incomplete. They're the ones I tend to give away or donate because I don't want to revisit them. Because of that, I'm much less willing to take a chance on new street photography books than other genres.
In general, I feel the bar is much higher for street photography than other genres precisely because the medium is so accessible. That's what creates the noise problem in the first place.
Thanks Timothy! The noise problem is real and I can see how it shapes the way the genre gets perceived. What I'd add is that the bar gets high for individual books partly because the layer that would normally help readers take risks on a new book (think critics and editorial platforms) is quite thin in street photography compared to other genres. So the burden falls on each book to prove itself cold (a tough ask!). I'm planning to get directly into this in the next essay. Curious to hear what you think when it's up.
Beautifully written. Vocalized what so many photographers and artists in general feel.
Been having institutional acclaim and exhibitions in Cleveland for my street photography for some years now — In the early days, there were moments of thinking “will anybody care about this while I’m alive?” The grant and gallery space is so complex. Truly knowing who your work is for is tough, assuming you ever even figure out your own voice.
Street photography has this unique challenge, like you alluded to, of being contemporary and historical, structural and spontaneous. Art is rarely easy, but as we move into the future, I too hope that the web of support grows for this precious craft, nurturing folks while they can still smell the flowers.
Thank you, Doriyan. I really appreciate this. Your point about institutional acclaim still not necessarily helping the work find a sustained audience feels very important. I’m hoping to think more in the next essay about what kinds of structures help work circulate beyond the exhibition or grant context. In your experience, has grant or gallery support helped your work keep reaching people after the exhibition ends, or does that remain the harder part?
For me, my two artist residences have fantastic for community building. Both have had strong educational focuses, so that’s rewarding in its own right.
My exhibitions have been publicized, so they’ve had net positive, yet unquantifiable impact to overall visibility. Every art institution I’ve worked with has wonderful people who champion their artists. Have certainly had things come across my desk where I know a collaborator recommended me for the opportunity.
Overall, however, I’d say most of my visibility has come from my own work on YouTube, Substack, etc.
That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like institutions can create important moments of visibility and connection, but the longer work of keeping an audience around the work still often falls back on the artist. That distinction is exactly what I’m trying to think through. Thank you for sharing this.
Great read and very interesting. As a burgeoning street photographer, it is no wonder that my mentor and others have negated my ideas of making any monies through the genre. I think this mindset discourages probably some truly great up and comers from pursuing their passion, which is sad. I for one am not seeking game or fortune, but to just simple make good photographs. A book would be nice, yes, but not the end-all.
"The canon is not the field." Wise words! Don't confuse what's been published with what deserves to be seen.
You are an accomplished writer. I am glad someone directed me to your Substack. Thanks!!!
A lot of what you’re saying resonates, but I do think you’re missing something that’s pretty significant. The books by established photographers that you mention are successful and memorable because of the quality of the work; these photographers all have a unique visual signature, they all know the difference between a good picture and a bad picture and more importantly which of those they should share, and which should go in the trash. I work in New York City and there are a tremendous amount of street photographers here. But there are very few whose work is singular, distinctly recognizable as their own, and of obvious consistent quality. The democratization that social media brought photography, and specifically street photography, has exponentially increased the amount of work that’s out in the public eye, but there are a few filters to separate good work from bad work. And many street photographers are working because of their enthusiasm for the genre, without a background of understanding about what has been done before or what constitutes good work. “Good Work” on social media could mean a photograph that gets a lot of likes - but remove that same photograph from the social outlet, place it in a venue that has more traditional criteria for weighing the merit of a photographers work, and the work quickly falls apart. Perhaps I’m naïve, perhaps I’m being either too optimistic or cynical, I’m not sure: but I believe as always in artistic pursuits, work that is valid will eventually emerge, while trends will fall away. If someone is doing truly excellent work, eventually they will be recognized. Unfortunately, that is never on a timetable that is pleasing for us as artists. But if you look at the history of art, that’s the way it’s always been. If I make something I like, that’s enough for me. External validation is elusive and always has been. In a world that could completely reject the paintings of Van Gogh during his lifetime, why should we expect that a photograph of someone eating a meatball sandwich in Bryant Park at golden hour will get anyone’s attention? Just do the work and keep getting better and don’t stop.
Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate a bit of disagreement here!
First, I agree that quality matters and having a unique signature as a photographer matters. Several readers have pointed out that a lot of work online may not have a lot of depth, and I actually just wrote a new essay about that (see The Best Street Photos Don't Win Contests). Where we diverge is "do the work and it will eventually emerge."
Take Alex Webb. I'd argue he's exactly the singular, consistent photographer you're describing. The Suffering of Light is still talked about fifteen years on, but not because the pictures rose on their own. Aperture published it, Magnum represented him, it stayed in print, it kept getting written about, it landed on syllabi and shelves. Strip those away and even that book loses its audience. The quality was necessary, but I'd argue that even for a book like this it isn't sufficient. Webb had the work and the whole apparatus around it. Photographers of the current generation do the work (and there's good work that even gets published) but they don't have anything that supports the afterlife of the book (assuming they manage to get published in the first place).
Second, I'd gently turn the Van Gogh example around. I think he's actually the clearest case of work not emerging on its own. Yes, he died unrecognized. But what made his work surface and gave it such an incredible afterlife is that his sister-in-law spent decades placing the paintings and building the record.
So I'm with you on "keep getting better and don't stop." I just don't think the rest takes care of itself. And that's the part I find most important: not just diagnosing the gap but asking what we can actually do about it. Whether that's a journal that reviews these books seriously and systematically, or reprinting good work to keep it in circulation, or even something as simple as donating books to libraries so they stay findable. I don't have an answer yet, and I plan to dig into it in a future essay because it's one thing to diagnose a problem, and quite another to work out what can actually be done about it.
Thanks for the response and it’s so wonderful to have some thoughtful & friendly back-and-forth, Vica!
Perhaps I sounded a little bit too flippant in my initial response - I didn’t mean to say that everything will take care of itself, we definitely need community and acknowledgment and most of all, luck. But I think that unless the work is good, no matter what mechanism you put around it will bring it larger success or recognition. Sure, platforms can be created that will serve as an echo chamber amongst users, one could say iRys is an example of this.
I’ve spoken to some very well-known photographers who surprised me by explaining that they had to raise 30 or $50,000 to publish a book. I’m not sure what can be done about it - there are so many problems to deal with, not the least of which is the whole AI question and what that’s going to do to the value of most creative work. The people who monetize/exploit the work of artists would love nothing more than not have to pay them and just have a computer do everything. So I think the biggest job is going to create work that differentiates itself from that which can be done by AI.
I think a realistic approach might be to create artistic collectives that present work in the real world; where people can touch the work and talk to the artists and understand the value and the craft. This has been done throughout history, and I think it’s gonna be more important now than ever to have real world human connection be a part of how art is presented and marketed. I guess we’ll find out! Thank you so much for the reply and for your thoughtful post - Jim
Thanks for thoughtfully analyzing and expressing many angles that have been plaguing me, as well (and which have similarly sent me scampering from IG in search of more rewarding environs). As a Chicagoan, I've largely resigned to leaving a trove of meaningful images in trunks and hoping for a Vivian Maier-esque post mortem discovery....
Thanks for sharing this. I hear you, but as a fellow photographer I do hope there can be other ways. What happened with Maier's work is what I'd call a miracle. From what I understand, someone bought her negatives at a storage locker auction. It could so easily not have happened, and all her work would have vanished.
But that's exactly why I started this Substack: there must be avenues beyond social media that let us share our work. Whether it's zines or books, I think that's really the best format for it. What I think we need to figure out is how we can collectively build ways to bring in grant funding, get critics to review the work, and get booksellers willing to take a chance on books outside the canon. The alternative is leaving it to posthumous luck, and I'd rather not.
In one way I am begining to think that the idea of Street photography where you only document what happens in the street/urban environment, without interacting with or knowing your subjects is also part of the problem.
Street photography is great as an art form but we do remove the other aspects of venacular photography your own every day where you use the same documentary style of photography.
If you take street style photos of the club where you do sports, of your art class, band practice, from the choire practice where you know people and interact with them. If you use the strictest definition of street photography those images are not street photography.
So do we miss something by having this strict idea of what street photography is, or perhaps this is a closely related gengre?
/ Jonas
Jonas, this is exactly the conversation I hoped the piece would start and you've put your finger on why I called this Substack Candid and not Street. What I care about isn't the rule (strangers, public space, no interaction) but the approach: catching someone unposed, in a moment we wouldn't otherwise see. Once a photographer is working that way, I don't think it matters much whether the subject is a stranger at a market or someone they know at band practice/art class etc. The band practice picture isn't "not street photography" so much as the same sensibility pointed somewhere more intimate and often those are the ones that hold together as a book more easily, because the relationship gives them a spine.
Where I'd push back on myself, though: this line of thinking could easily result in the conclusion that "strict street photography can't carry a book." And this wouldnt be the right conclusion as plenty of it can. Alex Webb's La Calle (his Mexico work over many years, which I have on my shelf) is nothing but strangers in public, chance (and over time color is introduced), no relationship to his subjects, and it holds together as a book in a way a feed never could. The less interesting street photography isn't dull because it's of strangers, it's dull because it's single-image thinking stretched out: seven okay frames in a carousel with nothing accumulating underneath. But I think that's a social media feed problem, not a genre problem.
But honestly, you've got me thinking this really deserves a full post rather than a reply buried in the comments. There's something here about how the strictest definition of street might be part of what keeps it out of the ecosystem, while the more intimate, project-shaped work gets let in more easily. Thank you for this.
The diagnosis lands. One thing I'd add from outside the photography industry but inside the work of building things from scratch: ecosystems rarely get built by waiting for institutions to notice. They get built by the people standing in the gap, deciding to do the work no one is paying them to do. Eyeshot is one of those. This Substack, if it becomes the thing you're describing, becomes another. The infrastructure that eventually gets called an ecosystem usually started as a handful of people refusing to wait.
"A handful of people refusing to wait" is a good way to put it. I'd add one thing though: the genres that do have ecosystems (fine art, documentary, photojournalism) didn't only get built by people refusing to wait. They also got built because grants, museums, MFA programs, and foundations eventually showed up. Aperture, the Guggenheim, the Alexia, the Eugene Smith, these institutions really made a difference. Street photography has almost none of that, and I think the absence is part of what we're up against. So both, probably: people refusing to wait *and* institutions eventually deciding the work is worth supporting. The first without the second can feel/be exhausting; the second without the first never starts.
That "exhausting" lands. What I keep turning over is why the scaffolding never showed up for street the way it did for documentary or fine art — whether it's consent, or that street resists being a single prestige object the way a portrait series or war archive does. I think you're naming the right gap.
Insightful statement. I agree on all counts. I also believe that the digital democratization of street photography has made it where street photographers are "a dime a dozen." Instagram propagated the process. For those who've been practicing before the digital democratization, there may have been some possible infrastructure that could broke through to success, flooding the market with so many lookalikes feeding the algorithm is too big a Goliath to overcome given the segmentation of street photography in 2010.
About the same time this article published, Jim Roche published his article speaking to a broader photography art market, that I believe intersects with this discussion. May be worth a read.
https://jimroche.substack.com/p/was-taking-up-photography-a-total?r=357tl4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Cheers!
Thank you, Kenneth, and for the link to the Jim Roche essay. He's coming at it from the gallery and art-market side, but we land in almost the same place: photography sits outside the art economy because it's reproducible, and the honest answer isn't to repair the gallery model but to build a parallel one. His section on Japan is a clear case that the photobook can be a system in itself.
On "a dime a dozen," I'll gently push back a bit, although I recognize where you are coming from. Yes, the volume is real and the algorithm rewards the lookalikes (we all have enough of photo dumps and recycled carousels, at least I do!). But I don't think that makes the Goliath unbeatable so much as it makes Instagram the wrong battlefield. The work that lasts was never going to be found by feeding the feed. That's exactly why I keep coming back to books and the structures around them: slower, but ours to build.
This is an interesting take. Ive always works thinking that genres like portraiture, street photography, landscapes, are elements that can make up a body of work. But of course each of those can be their own space for mastery.
Thank you. Yes, I agree. For many photographers, genre works more as an element than as a fixed category. The work I admire most often sits somewhere between documentary, environmental portraiture, and street.
What I was trying to get at is slightly different: even when the photographer is working across genres, the moment a book leans visibly into street photography, the publishing and grant infrastructure seems to know less easily what to do with it than work framed as, say, documentary.
So yes, the work itself may be cross genre. But the way the ecosystem receives it is not quite as flexible.