I wouldn’t say I ever had serious ambitions to be a ‘real’ photographer, but I did used to
fantasize about it once in a while. I suppose I still do. I never wanted to be a fashion
photographer or a war photographer or a landscape photographer: I wanted to be a street
photographer, you know like Winogrand, Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Gilden. It’s a genre that
allows, in fact demands, the photographer does a lot of walking.
Susan Sontag backs me up on this. ‘The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque".’
Well that’s good enough for me, although over the years people have come to disapprove of the term ‘shooting’ to describe taking pictures so lord knows how we’re supposed to feel about being ‘armed.’
Therefore, given the previous post about Rainbow crossings, I thought you might like to see some street photography of people crossing the road, in some cases waiting to cross the road.
