page_title: Street photography
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Street photography / History / Twentieth-century practitioners / France
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Aufnahme eines Fensterputzers am Kottbusser Tor In Berlin
context_page_description: Street photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
  The street photographer can be seen as an extension of the flâneur, an observer of the streets.
  Framing and timing can be key aspects of the craft with the aim of some street photography being to create images at a decisive or poignant moment.
  Street photography can focus on people and their behavior in public, thereby also recording people's history. This motivation entails having also to navigate or negotiate changing expectations and laws of privacy, security and property.
context_section_description: The post-war French Humanist School photographers found their subjects on the street or in the bistro. They worked primarily in black‐and‐white in available light with the popular small cameras of the day, discovering what the writer Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) called the "fantastique social de la rue" (social fantastic of the street) and their style of image-making rendered romantic and poetic the way of life of ordinary European people, particularly in Paris. Between 1946 and 1957 Le Groupe des XV annually exhibited work of this kind.
  Street photography formed the major content of two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York curated by Edward Steichen, Five French Photographers: Brassai; Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Ronis, Izis in 1951 to 1952, and Post-war European Photography in 1953, which exported the concept of street photography internationally. Steichen drew on large numbers of European humanist and American humanistic photographs for his 1955 exhibition The Family of Man, proclaimed as a compassionate portrayal of a global family, which toured the world, inspiring photographers in the depiction of everyday life.
  Henri Cartier-Bresson's widely admired Images à la Sauvette (1952) (the English-language edition was titled The Decisive Moment)  promoted the idea of taking a picture at what he termed the "decisive moment"; "when form and content, vision and composition merged into a transcendent whole". His book inspired successive generations of photographers to make candid photographs in public places before this approach per se came to be considered déclassé in the aesthetics of postmodernism.
caption: Window cleaner at Kottbusser Tor, Berlin, by Elsa Thiemann c.1946
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