n my ear­lier days as a stu­dent of pho­tog­ra­phy, I would stroll the street of Shanghai with some money, rolls of black & white films in my pock­ets and my cam­era on my hands; shoot­ing pretty much every­thing that I see and going home with dozens of used film can­is­ters after the dark, my life was all pho­tog­ra­phy then.

I would then go to the library and read any books about pho­tog­ra­phy, soon real­iz­ing I was not read­ing, I was mostly glanc­ing & star­ing at all those pho­tographs that I later came to know as mas­ter­pieces, pho­tographs that are so sim­ple & mod­est they show the true col­ors of our day-to-day lives, the same pho­to­graph seen from an artis­tic point of view becomes fine art.

I read an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion from a fel­low street shooter, Nick Turpin, related to his book that he’s writ­ing, posted a dia­gram on his blog sug­gest­ing that pho­to­graphic land­scape in the world of pub­li­ca­tion falls between three poles: Fine Art, Photojournalism & Street Photography and related to his research, he put the pho­tog­ra­phers into per­spec­tive and tried to cat­e­go­rize & relate each pho­tog­ra­phers to the afore men­tioned poles.

I agree. But…

The cor­re­la­tion between the three gen­res are obvi­ous as well as sub­lime, putting it into a pic­ture gives a per­spec­tive, but from my point of view, it doesn’t quite illus­trate its depth; where it lies the great spirit of journalism.

Street pho­tog­ra­phy has been the play­ing field for many pre-war pho­tog­ra­phers, they were the main­stream of pho­tog­ra­phy that pre-dates the war, leg­endary pho­to­jour­nal­ists can be con­sid­ered street pho­tog­ra­phers, and vice versa due to its nature of shoot-what-you-see, tell-what-people-don’t-hear approach to their subjects.

Instead of a flat dia­gram, I think it’s more appro­pri­ate to include time, & photographer’s age to see it in a more rel­e­vant perspective:

A photographer’s growth is photography’s progress. Looking at my photo archive, I can clearly see the dis­tinc­tive changes in the style of my work, and the col­lec­tive pho­tog­ra­phy works that I ref­er­enced span­ning nearly a cen­tury from the early 1900s till now–reflected a sim­i­lar pat­tern with my own growth as a photographer.

The art of Photography moves together with the photographer’s vision, the world that it opened up and appre­ci­a­tion as a work of art from the com­mu­nity; the street as the train­ing field, pic­ture desk/photo edi­tors as their cura­tors and even­tu­ally the pub­lic as the crit­ics of the end result.

There is no bound­ary when it comes to art, pho­tog­ra­phy included. Drawing a dia­gram and label­ing pho­tog­ra­phy is sim­ply syn­thetic medioc­racy. Let nature runs it course and let peo­ple grow with the joy of tak­ing pictures.

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The beau­ti­ful drop cap is a fine work of art by Jessica Hische, every day she intro­duces a new let­ter to her beau­ti­ful blog where you can get yours for free.