I have been thinking a lot this week about being a lady street photographer. No, that is not quite right. I have been thinking about me being a street photographer. A couple of things have happened that I need to put together.

First of all, I have been in conversations with an Admin of a Facebook street photography group who wants to give special recognition to the female members of the group. I admire that. He wants his group to be woman friendly. You would not think that could possibly be a problem. Anything is possible.

That messaging with the Admin lead me to reflect again on the 2019 Miami Street Photography Festival. The star of the festival was Nikos Economopoulis. I get it. He is a Magnum photographer and his exhibition was really astounding. An invited speaker was Gulnara Samoilova, the founder of #womenstreetphotographers on Instagram. She was honored, but she was not in the group of stars. That was a little hard for me to imagine. She was the one photographer I wanted to meet, to talk with, and to watch in action. Gulnara has single handedly given women street photographers from around the world opportunities to post and exhibit and grow since 2017. She is my hero. It was not lost on me that during a critique session, she and Nikos mixed it up a little. Let me just say, Nikos is really a nice guy. They are good friends. But he comes from a tradition of street photography being mostly a man’s world. He can have a hard time seeing a woman’s frame of reference. And so, during the critique he could not understand a point Gulnara was making. I understood it completely and immediately. Gulnara defended her turf in no uncertain terms.

The third event was my experience with the photo I put up for critique, On Holy Ground. I had seen it on my device that shows Instagram posts. Gosh, it is not a pretty photo. It has almost no compositional merit. The exposure isn’t great. I did not spend a lot of time fixing that in post processing. But it actually has a fairly significant story, if you look at it for just a bit. I don’t think the story even depends on the cultural or religious context. What it may depend on is whether you are a female viewer. One of the most articulate observations in the critique came from David Fleurant, who is on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design. David observed that, “For insiders this photograph is easy to read for outsiders such as myself it makes no sense at all without a caption or a flow of other images to give it context.”

This is one of seven of my images that I have found so far that pack a huge message for and about me, and I dare say, for some number of my female viewers. Not a single one of them is a pretty picture. They are quite raw. It is not a situation where you can take much time to compose.

Perhaps I could make my most personal messages clear to everyone with a caption. But here is the thing, captions are discouraged in street photography. The purist thinking on this is that a street photo should stand in its own merits. If you have to tell someone what it is about, you have failed. Does that model work if you have one group who cannot possibly understand certain photos taken by another group?

My goals in street photography do not always coincide with the traditions that have developed over the years. I do not worry, for example, if my comment will somehow rob you of the story you would get just by looking at a picture in a void of information. I understand that, contrary to traditional thinking, most likely the comments I attached to pictures I posted on Instagram helped increase my viewers engagement.

I began feeling a little sorry for myself in a street photography world that possibly suits men better. I got to thinking, “I need a platform where I can show context in the way that I want to.” Then I remembered that I already have that in my Galleries on this website. I have not spent much time updating them because I don’t have the updating procedures down like I do for posting a blog. I plan to change that. I want the Galleries to take their fair place in this website.

Correction note: Gulnara Samiolova founded #womenstreetphotographers. Casey Meshbesher founded #womeninstreet.

Dedicated to Street

As I See It - Thoughts on Being a Lady Street Photographer