In Defense of Street Photography in an iPhone Age
Last Halloween (my birthday, as it happens), I loaded up my Bolex to shoot some 16mm black-and-white images of a children’s costume parade in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I was thinking of Helen Levitt’s 1948 masterpiece, In the Street. Levitt (and her co-cinematographers James Agee and Janis Loeb) used a small camera to surreptitiously record images (mostly of children) in Spanish Harlem. The film is a poetic time capsule — observational vignettes that become more than the sum of their parts.
The Bolex looks pretty big these days compared to digital cameras, so I wasn’t hiding anything from anybody. As I stood on the sidewalk next to parents snapping cell phone photos, I encountered a fair amount of resistance. Several people asked me point blank what I was doing (which I thought was pretty obvious). They seemed unsatisfied with my admittedly vague response (“Shooting some footage, may turn it into a short documentary”).
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Photo credit: Lima Limpia, 2015, Mark Street.