If your photos are not candid, then they are not street photography. If it’s not a candid moment, then it’s not a capture of real life as it happened, which is what gives street photography its beauty and power. This is what also makes street photography so challenging. While posed photos can be a good place to start out, at some point, the photographer needs to move on from posed and scripted photography.
Taking candid captures on the streets brings things to a whole new level of photography. Candid captures generally require a greater skill level when it comes to camera use. It is also much more dangerous and challenging to take unscripted and uninvited photographs. I think one reason so much of the ‘street photography’ being produced today is of posed and scripted subjects, is due to the fear people have of taking candid shots in public.
can·did
ˈkandəd/
adjective2. A photograph of a person taken informally, especially without the subject’s knowledge.
synonyms: unposed, informal, uncontrived, impromptu, natural
“candid shots”
Street photography inherited this unscripted and unposed attribute from its two related schools of photography, photojournalism and social documentary.
People being ‘aware’ of one’s presence, is NOT the same as posing or scripting shots. In the image above, Teddy and Stutters are aware that I’m there, but it’s a candid capture (it’s more a social doc image, but the same applies).
For example: I’ve been living in this house down in New Orleans for just over two weeks photographing, and never once have I asked anyone to do anything. “Can you stand over there? can you do that again please? That’s great, now hold still” are just not things you’ll hear me say. I stay out of it, like a kid looking through a store glass window. And yet, everyone knows that I’m here.
I think that if we do our research, we’ll see that the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand – who all created deliberately candid images – defined street photography long before the hipster kids came along with their rapid-fire digital cameras and Instagram filters…