The Still and Moving Street: Anonymous Portraiture Derived Through a Practice of Concept-Driven Street Photography

Abstract

Street photography is often considered as a genre underpinned by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s conception of the ‘decisive moment.’ Such traditional forms of practice are characterised by speed and spontaneity, involving the photographer moving through the city streets in search of moments of significance existing within the everyday. There are, however, alternative strategies employed by practitioners that entail a more sedate and systematic, process-led approach. The discussion of such practices, which deviate from the dominant discourse, has been absent from much of the existing scholarship on the genre. This thesis is centred on the investigation of unconventional forms of street photography, which I term as practices of concept-driven street photography. These approaches see the employment of parameter-based systems to determine the set of conditions used to create photographic based work within the urban context. I propose affinities in these alternative methodologies as being found in sociological led investigations into the everyday, as well as in conceptual art projects emerging in the 1960s. In recent decades the genre of street photography has expanded to incorporate the moving image, signalling a shift away from the rigidity of the still image it has been tethered to since its beginnings. This thesis investigates the circumstances that have precipitated the evolution of the genre as it progresses further into the twenty-first century. The analysis of alternative forms of street photography and its expansion to include the moving image is conducted with specific focus on the anonymous, unposed portrait image, which has featured prominently throughout the history of the genre. The creative work of this research, comprised of still and moving image outcomes, presents a new form of contemporary portraiture and representation of the street.