How Youtubers Ruined Street Photography (myself included)

Just take the photos, choose and post the best and forget about what everyone else is doing. And for God's sake dump the torturous walk through narrative shit.

Can’t believe you guys, beautiful is in the eye of the beholder, what your saying is blank paper ruined the artist.

I've never thought about making money with street photography ) I'm making street photos since 2003-2004. There was no trend about that even. I've made few really cool urban shots using just some old compact Canon camera. It was just for fun and self-realization.
Now you're talking about some "street photography standards" ))
It's a backside of capitalism. Once somebody "takes" your area of interests you need to compete or you're loosing. It's not about capitalism only or I'll be cheating in facts. It's more about the economy if it's linked with things that you do and... if it's about money in general.

The untold truth is that you can't do street photography the same way in every country. In asia, you can basically do what you want as long as you're polite and respectful, like it was in Europe a hundred years ago. In western europe, in 2023 if you show you have a camera in a big city, it's just a matter of time before you get attacked and robbed. What french photographers like Depardon, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson did, is lost, because although some streets look the same, the population changed.

Great video well done 👏 could not agree more!

i dont agree. before YT and even the internet in general, photography was less accessable. street photography today is less special because more people are doing it. if you are one of those "i only liked photography when it was niche" then you were never into photography, you just like niche things.

i feel like the same could be said with instragram and art. the issue has to do with the almighty algorithm. creativity is slowly becoming a game of calculation. "how long will it take me to create this x so i can post it in the shortest amount of time?"

I can see your point. Willem Veerbeck
@willemveerbeck comes to mind as someone that is celebrated for taking mediocre photos of already mundane things.

I've recently found Trevor Wisecups work and he has given me inspiration to go out there and be a menace with my camera and to get into those uncomfortable situations because in those you'll learn a lot about the world and yourself. Throughout my time of photography/ videography I've learnt that gear is the last thing to worry about, there are some phone photographers that create more interesting images than mine and there's some people with cameras I can't afford that take photos which make me feel nothing

If I'm enjoyed in doing street photography, I don't really care what other people evaluate my photo. those video made me felt I'm understandable when st photography not popular around me.

This feels like such a silly thing to complain about in sure most photographers in all of history haven't really been that good at it but like golf ever now and then you can get lucky with one really great shot. The medium as a whole doesn't suffer from more people participating in it

If anything, chasing money is the problem!

Ruin? No. But you might be a good car salesman.

Instagram, TikTok and YT shorts all short media ruined Street photography. They turned it into PG onlyfans mainly. Find a hot girl take a very basic portrait in street settings post and repeat. Lonely men then eat it up because of the girls. Now everyone does it and it's a saturated market of it.

so your critique is just that people have a more open window to their workflow, because doing so can net them more money. ok and? your video has half its time dedicated to squarespace, seems to be the same issue you're complaining about lmao

Spot on! A great analysis of a phenomenon that has been growing over the years of pretty boring photos classified as "street" photography just because the arena was the street!

I can quite agree with the sentiment on what's become (I don't know what it once was), but since seeing Kai's videos back in 2012 and the way street photography is done today, it's one of the reasons I start shifting away from shooting human targets and focused more on the scenic aspects. I think this technically puts me in the urban/travel photography category now, but it's become harder to stand out when everyone is posting similar things (and living in a small city definitely doesn't help since you're essentially walking the same areas over and over again).

How I can improve as a photographer? I'm not sure since I don't want to tell a story in my works but rather share glimpses in time, which honestly isn't as appealing to others. Taking away human subjects makes that even harder too.

i have been following you since your first days on YT , and man i have lately started hating these kind of yt videos and suddenly everything that becomes a trend and (mid creators) pushing the idea that street photography is simply a few compositions they show on their fast paced videos is just ridiculous to me man even cameras became a trend today while iam sure most of them eventually end up in a juror collecting dust after this insane tiktok hit , iam not agains this mass hype but i miss the old days when people realy shared worthwhile work and not the same repetitive images that we have today , i just remember my my hesitation before i took the courage to post a street photograph after maybe 2 years of daily learning and shooting .

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Kai was a big inspiration for me too!

That's what books are for. No prob with that. Sorry warhol is a fraud. His friends and his mom are the ppl with the ideas.

3 best tools for street photography- practice, tenacity, and a small capable camera- Ricoh GR or Fuji X100 series are tops

I guess I don’t understand the conclusion. To me, there’s no such thing as a bad photo day. There’s also no such thing as a bad photo. My purpose when creating a photograph is to share my interpretation of the world at that moment. Not every image achieves the level of storytelling that I want from a single frame, but the important part was never the image. It was always the process that was important. Going out and witnessing the world.

Must admit I'm more than pleased with the opportunity to put my street photography videos on my YT channel and Instagram, otherwise my print negatives would have remained buried in the basement and garage never to see the light of day. I was use to showing in small art galleries and coffee shops but now these venues have brought thousands of views from around the world. Kinda neat, plus if I'm the next Vivian Maier, I'll be easier to find.

Those flickering lights are so disturbing… 👀

I feel Instagram did this same thing to me as an amature photographer. I may not have had a financial incentive, but the social incentive made me feel like i needed to be posting everyday and that had a negative impact on how i approached an art form i genuinely love.

From the moment you define photos that were taken for a technical yt video as low quality, you are assuming to know what quality is. Cisidering that quality is inevitably related to a standard, the above standard is defined as high quality. So what is the standard? Providing that someone has talent and their work get generally well accepted, standard and/or quality are just subjective matters, which a seasoned artist should not worry about...I appreciate uou view tho, but I dont necessarily agree that the quality has decreased.

None of the photos presented here are worth anything. Forgettable images which look like all the other garbage churned out now by people with no talent for photography.

it;s your perspective. i have not seen a single person who oppose me while shoot on streets, or festivals, or Christmas market. you have to be mindful of your surroundings. be there, be part of the society and take a photograph. you do not need to sneak on people or stand behind pillars..

I don't profess to know what street photography is, yet I think that it needs some sort of rudimentary definition that at least some of us can agree to. First, "street," I think, denotes a place but also the life that occurs in that place. So "street photography" seems tied to a specific place and time. Thus, the images inform us about that place in time, who or what inhabits that place, and the photographer's biases or perspective. Street photography may also have an underlying theme or issue that drives it, but not necessarily. In any case, (good?) street photography makes a statement and conveys a feeling or attitude. Now, when shooting, not all images are "keepers." If you look at photographers' proof sheets (old school) or transparencies that should be evident. However, what determines a good pic? The decisive moment? Classic composition? Innovative perspective? Not all shots possess all three characteristics or even more. But some are still good and even powerful images. This aside, the question still remains, "How does the photog achieve these images?," and "How does the photog learn?" Granted that watching a photog show you how she loads film and then go out and shoot is, IMHO, kinda boring. All that stuff was de rigueur when I was shooting, and laughable to me, but may hold some value for beginners. What I am interested in is developing the ability to pay attention, honing the ability to tell that something is going to happen worth photographing, and cultivating the skill to discern the impact of an image in real time while photographing. To me that embodies street photography; otherwise, you might as well cock the camera's shutter, start the self timer, and throw the camera into the air. Total randomness in action. Hurray! Yet, a straightforward video showing a photog walking around and shooting may not be educational nor captivating. It only shows the surface of what is really going on or what could be going on. Otherwise, for the most part, that type of video may mostly entertain rather than inform.

I love videos like this and would love more. I've been feeling like a lot of social media street photography is homogenising, becoming more of the same for various reasons, and real thoughtful pieces looking at why and how we approach photography, like this, are gold.

Like with all craft’s, society craves innovation to create tools that dumb down the complexity and skill needed to create. Then they use these tools to create consumerism and before you know it, mediocrity becomes the new norm. Differentiating quality from mediocre is like finding a needle in a haystack. Consumers don’t even have the knowledge to know what to look for to make such judgements. The market isn’t any longer to own an image… it’s to display an image just long enough to get liked. So volume becomes the driver and quality is irrelevant. We live in sad times. But there again, just look at your furniture and other goods that were traditionally crafted. It’s the same.

That’s why I sold my Leica. You can’t really be stealth anymore, it’s no longer a thing…”I used to love her”. + everyone is on their phones, difficult to capture anything interesting in life anymore😢

Veo muchos fotógrafos que salen a la calle a disparar como locos cualquier cosa. Caminan, giran, ven una casa, le hacen foto, giran, ven un auto, foto. Ven un edificio, foto. Ven gente, y casi siempre de espaldas...foto. Pero, sinceramente esos fotógrafos yo creo que están aquí para que YT les pague algo de dinero. Solo por eso. Porque para mi, la fotografía callejera no es YT, no es IG, no es Tik Tok, por lo que YT no puede matarla. La buena fotografía callejera allí está, en los libros, en las enseñanzas de los grandes, y a la vuelta de tu casa. Solo hay que ir a buscarla. Siempre está viva, porque la fotografía se hace para uno, y no para los demás.

I have to agree with you on this one. I've tried to create YT content for a while and honestly - from my own experience - it is hard to create a meaningful street photos when your mind are juggling between the needs of creating a quality video content and photography at the same time. Now I've stop creating YT videos and just focusing on my blog and photography. I know that people nowadays are spending less time on reading and more on watching videos but, for me, as long as I'm happy with the results I'm getting from the images, the rest wont matter. I'm not planning to be famous anyway. Thanks for sharing. Cheers!

I thought digirev was the top gear for cameras