Styles / Street & snapshot
New York street photography
- Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.
Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Black-and-white 35 mm pictures of New York's sidewalks, parades, parks and crowds, made from about 1955 to 1975 by photographers who took Robert Frank's The Americans as permission to break the rules: wide-angle lenses close to strangers, tilted horizons, cut-off figures, grain and blur, hard sun or murky bars. People are caught unawares or stare back. The pictures argue for no reform; they are wry, uneasy notes on American public life, sequenced in books and shown in museums.
How the look is made
- Work the street every day with a small camera and a wide-angle lens, close to strangers.
- Release on instinct, and let the frame tilt and cut people off when that keeps more of the scene in.
- Accept grain, blur and hard light as part of the picture; do not polish the print.
- Look for the odd, funny or uneasy coincidence in public life, and do not explain it.
- Shoot a great deal and make the work in the edit, as sequences for a book or a wall.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.
- Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight. Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
- Shadow depth
- Dark shadows that still hold some detail (a high lighting ratio, about 4:1 to 8:1: the shadow side two to three stops darker).
How the style is lit
- Hard midday sun with long, dark shadows on the sidewalk.
- Dim available light in bars, diners, buses and convention halls.
- A flash fired in daylight to separate a sitter from the street.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- Then
- 28–50 mm · f/2–f/11 · 1/1000–1/30 s · ISO 200–800 on full frame, documented. Leicas with 28 mm lenses and Tri-X (Winogrand, whose 'nice light' was 1/250 s at f/8), Klein's wide lenses close to faces, Frank's 35 mm Leica, Arbus's 6 × 6 Rolleiflex. Wide apertures, 1/30 s and pushed film in dim bars and halls are inferred.
- Focal length
- A wide view; near things loom and lines stretch towards the edges.
- Focus
- Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
- Angle
- The horizon deliberately off level (Dutch angle).
- Distance
- Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
- The photographer
- Shot from the hip, hidden or unnoticed.
- Balance
- Tilted lines and oblique movement drive the picture.
- Crop & fill
- The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
- Depth
- Separate events in the foreground, middle ground and background.
- Instant
- A casual, unplanned instant, taken quickly.
Direct
Nobody is posed: pedestrians are caught mid-stride, mid-gesture or half hidden behind someone's back, crowds jostle, and some notice the camera and stare or glare straight back; awkward, unflattering in-between moments are kept. A close portrait may stand square to the lens, arms down, facing the camera plainly.
- Body position
- Caught or posed in mid-step, one foot lifted, clothes swinging.
- Head & gaze
- Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye.
- Line & energy
- In-between moments a conventional photographer would throw away, kept on purpose: half-blinks, mid-chew, limbs at odd angles.
- The moment
- People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
- With the sitter
- The subject sees the camera and reacts to it.
Style the set
Nothing is styled: strangers in the street clothes of the day (hats, suits, overcoats, sailor and police uniforms, Sunday best at a parade), on real sidewalks and in bars, parks and convention halls, just as they were met.
- Clothes
- What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Monochrome
- Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between. A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys.
- Film
- A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed.
- Texture
- Film grain or noise you can see at normal size.
- Post-production
- Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
- Shown as
- Pictures made and shown as a set.
- Shown in
- The book as the main form of the work.
Stay away from testimony & advocacy, directed scene & tableau, heavy retouching, composite & montage, soft studio light, soft focus & diffusion, fully art-directed and studio backdrop.
Before you shoot it
For new street work, ask before publishing a close portrait and credit the photographers' estates.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- New York , Garry Winogrand, 1969. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- New York City , Robert Frank, 1954. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- Gun 2, New York , William Klein, 1955. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- Convention Hall, Chicago, from the series The Americans , Robert Frank, 1955–1956, printed 1977. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
With other styles
The opposite: French humanist photography. Humanists wait for a tender, level 50 mm instant; this school tilts, widens and sours it, so choose by whether the brief wants affection or unease.
Pairs with FSA/OWI documentary photography. Walker Evans's plain view of American signs, cars and storefronts sits under The Americans; borrow those subjects and loosen the frame around them.
Pairs with Provoke and are-bure-boke. Provoke pushed Klein's grain, blur and tilt to the edge of legibility; go that far when the brief wants mood over information.
Pairs with New Color photography. New Color kept the snapshot's ordinary subjects but slowed down and switched to colour; borrow it to calm and warm a street series.
Sources
- The Americans (photography), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(photography) (Delpire, Paris, 15 May 1958; Grove Press 1959 with Kerouac; 83 of about 28,000 frames; 1955 Guggenheim; Popular Photography's 'meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons')
- Robert Frank, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank (1924–2019; Harper's Bazaar 1947; Walker Evans recommended him for the Guggenheim; Evans's American Photographs as an influence; grain, blur, low light, irony)
- William Klein (photographer), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Klein_(photographer) (1926–2022; New York book 1956, Prix Nadar 1957; wide-angle lenses, natural light, motion blur; 'fathers of street photography' with Frank)
- Garry Winogrand, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Winogrand (1928–1984; The Animals 1969, Women Are Beautiful 1975, Public Relations 1977; Toward a Social Landscape 1966; New Documents 1967; about 2,500 undeveloped rolls at his death)
- World's Fair, New York City, Fundación MAPFRE on Google Arts & Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/world%C2%B4s-fair-new-york-city-garry-winogrand/2gG4Upso1jMZBA (Leica, wide-angle lens and ten rolls of Tri-X a day; frame tilted away from the horizon)
- New Documents, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Documents (MoMA, February–May 1967; Szarkowski; 94 photographs by Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand; 'not to reform life, but to know it')
- Street photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography (The Americans 'challenged all the formal rules laid down by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans'; Images à la sauvette inspired candid photography in public; Evans's subway series 1938–41; privacy concerns)
- Diane Arbus, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus (35 mm Nikon, Rolleiflex from about 1962, Mamiyaflex with flash from 1964; daylight flash; subjects on the margins; Sontag's 'Freak Show'; Esquire and Harper's Bazaar from 1960)
- Mason Resnick, 'Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop with Garry Winogrand', photogs.com (B&W World): https://photogs.com/bwworld/winogrand.html (August 1976: 'two Leica M4's, equipped with 28mm lenses and dozens of rolls of Tri-X'; on leaving the building: 'nice light--1/250 second at f/8'; a meterless camera, adjusted as he passed from shadow into sunlight)
- World's Fair, New York City, Fundación MAPFRE on Google Arts & Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/world%C2%B4s-fair-new-york-city-garry-winogrand/2gG4Upso1jMZBA (Winogrand's Leica, wide-angle lens and ten rolls of Tri-X a day; frame tilted away from the horizon)
- William Klein (photographer), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Klein_(photographer) (wide-angle lenses, natural light and motion blur in the New York book of 1956)
- 'The Americans' Revisited, the photography of Robert Frank, History News Network: https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/120176 (in 1955 Frank 'pressed the shutter on his 35mm Leica three times' at a Los Angeles rooming house; more than 27,000 pictures in 1955–56)
- Diane Arbus, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus (a 35 mm Nikon, a Rolleiflex from about 1962 and a Mamiyaflex with flash from 1964; flash in daylight)
- Kodak Tri-X, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Tri-X (introduced around 1940 in sheets rated ASA 200 daylight; released in 35 mm and 120 in 1954; usually rated ISO 400; pushing to EI 800 gives very good results, EI 1600 needs more sophisticated processing, stand development reaches EI 3200)