Street Photography Taxonomy

Street photography is something that bothers me, so I want to understand it. And to understand things, I need to classify them and understand how they relate. Call it professional bias. With street photography, I quickly hit a wall: the term clearly covers many disparate activities and everybody has a point of view on what it really is about. So when I tried to classify it, I realised that I couldn’t create a neat and orderly way of breaking things down using the clear known categories. Street photography taxonomy My starting point was the categories I’ve always used: urban, architecture, street portraits, street activity, events. But these didn’t seem to always work with the photographs I was looking at. For example, an empty alley at dusk where the light is the subject isn’t architecture or urban, exactly. A candid portrait of a stranger and a carefully composed shot of someone who knows you’re there aren’t really the same category either. It became clear that calling all these…