No, the cell phone killed photo reporters, which is a different story.
I knew, when I posted that message, that people would be upset. Why do I believe that street photography is dead as an art form?
Maybe we should turn the question around: what makes an art form alive?
People who have followed my ramblings on this forum may remember that, at different times, I gave two different definitions of art:
- art is what creates emotions in the viewer
- art is what hangs in a museum.
I now realise that the two are necessary. You need the emotion and you need the social recognition. The social recognition, in turn, needs financing. Things which hang in museum are expensive and that, in turn, implies marketing efforts. It also implies that the artist will be able to live from his or her art. Which makes him not an amateur, as amateur do it for free.
We can date back street photography to people like
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget, but that was not the golden age. The golden age was more people like
Robert Doisneau,
Henri Cartier-Bresson or, in America,
Garry Winogrand (just 3 examples from the West). We can obviously add Stanley Kubrick, the subject of this thread.
Cartier-Bresson is a bit of an outsider here, because he was primarily a journalist. The others did not hesitate to set up the pictures, using models when necessary for example. But even Cartier-Bresson did not picture reality as it was, all the so-called "street pictures" from that golden age present Paris or New-York as in a Disney fantasy. It was never like that. It was like that in the movies of the time, but movies are not true.
And, at the time, people wanted to see that fantasy. It was exotic. Paris was exotic for the Americans, New-York was exotic to the Europeans. So the pictures raised emotions in the viewers and sold well. Emotions + money: it was art.
Then,
Robert Frank came and broke that dream in 1958. It would take another decade, but eventually artists would realise that the kind of fantasy pictures that we had was no longer an option. That is probably the point at which street photography actually died (long before the smartphone). The public suddenly new that the dream was a lie.
And the public started travelling. New York or Paris can be presented through the deforming mirrors of Doisneau or Winogrand when only the jet set cross the Atlantic. When everyone can actually board a jet, they know and they take the pictures themselves. It becomes travel photography, souvenirs and memorabilia.
All the famous street photography pictures are over half a century old. That is why the genre is frozen in black and white. That is even true for people like
Vivian Maier, her most famous pictures are the early ones, not the later ones in colours.
Now, you will probably object that there are still street photographers today. There are indeed, and more than ever, but they are either amateurs or cater for an amateur market. Especially on the Internet, I can't count the number of street photography sites, who are actually run mainly as an advertising platform for courses designed for the enthusiast. The photography industry played this card: the world is full of people who have a camera, but no subject. The world is full of people like Vivian Maier: not much of a life, not many friends, not many ideas. What are they going to use their brand new camera for? So the industry (magazines, photo web sites...) tells them: "the world is full of subjects!" Just look down the street near you, it is bustling with life and subjects. You just need to be prepared, and it is best if you have a complete collection of lenses for any possible occasion.
Bingo.
So the world is full of photographers with a complete collection of lenses, looking for a subject and not knowing which one. That is actually the reason for the absurd rule that nothing can be set up (while many iconic street photographs were set up): it is best if the amateur spends the cash on lenses than on renting a model. But their pictures are, in truth, all the same, because there is only one reality which is the same for everyone and no dream. And nobody really wants to see their pictures, because they went down the street themselves and already saw the same thing. No real artist would touch the genre with a ten feet pole, because they know it cannot sell and artists need to sell to be recognised as such. The genre is effectively dead.
Besides, if you want to look it up, today you have
Google Street View. It is over ten years old. Welcome to the 21st century.