WEEK 1: To the Street

“You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.” (William Eggleston)

We move through the city, we live in houses. Architecture is all around us, and always influencing our lives. Cities can provide safety, or they can be a threat; they carry uncountable stories, and they transport history. The connection between photography and architectural space is as old as the medium of photography itself: the oldest surviving camera photograph shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of Le Gras, the estate of French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, as seen from a high window. Louis Daguerre shot his famous earliest known photograph of a person from a ”View of the Boulevard du Temple.  Street photography is a genre of photography that is encompassing numerous photographers and styles. In general, it refers to photography taken in urban public spaces, looking into streets, stores or cafes, picking out groups of passers-by or individuals, often as a snapshot, but also as an essay-like sequence or milieu study. 

But the conflicts that arise when photographing in public space seem today almost as old as the medium itself. We will discuss the conflicts between ethics and consent, the difference between snapshots, artistic photography and various methods to record life in our city.

Artists: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, William Klein, Martin Parr,  Vivian Maier, Nina Welch-Kling, Michelle Groskopf, Dominique Misrahi, Gulnara Samoilova a.o.