The Differences Between Street and Journalistic Photography
I have come across the term “journalistic” on two occasions very recently. First, a couple of weeks ago, the Facebook group Inspired Street Photography changed its name to Inspired Street Photography and Reportage. The second time I encountered the term was in a comment to my blog on Snapshots. My Nashville friend, Al Wood, observed, “Another label that can be used in a derogatory fashion as snapshot is reportage. I have heard it used to denigrate images that are technically of high quality but to a reviewer merely reportage because in their view the subject matter is mundane or has no artistic value.”
I realize, with the very different implications of the term journalistic in these two settings, that I do not really understand what journalistic means. For the life of me, I probably could not distinguish a street photo from a journalistic photo. I am going to put that to a test as I search out journalistic photos from my images. And yet, I could absolutely imagine someone using the term journalistic in a negative way, just as Al had reported.
These people were protesting tragic gentrification of this traditional, affordable area to live in Panama City. One of their apartment buildings had burned to the ground the evening before after a mysterious fire was started. I was deliberately journalistic in taking this photo.
While this could have been included in the journalistic set about this protest, it is more a street photo for me.
As I read about the differences between journalistic and street photography, I was reminded about their similarity. They both record aspects of daily life, but the intent and execution of how daily life is recorded is very different between the two genres.
Journalistic photography is the telling of news. The goal is to capture a fair and accurate representation of an event. There is a narrative element to it that creates an expectation that an image will be combined with other images or bits of news in order to make facts relatable to the viewer. At a minimum, there is normally an explanatory comment. In street photography, the goal is to capture a moment in an interpretive, subjective way. Explanatory comment is discouraged in street photography because of the belief that the viewer should have an opportunity to make their own subjective interpretation.
This is more journalistic photography than street photography taken in Warsaw.
This is definitely street photography taken in Warsaw.
Journalistic photography has little room for creative style. Often, there is minimal or no post processing done on journalistic images. Everything is expected to be in-camera. Creative composition is valued in street photography. While extreme post processing is generally frowned upon in the genre, some post processing, including cropping is common.
Journalistic photography has no restrictions in setting whereas street photography is defined traditionally as occurring in public places. An example of this is the candid pictures taken at a wedding reception. These pictures are intended to record the event. They are likely to be grouped together to create a narrative of the wedding.
Journalistic photos are intended to have broad public interest. The street photography audience, on the other hand, is likely to be limited to other photographers.
This strikes me as a photo that could be published to report on a Pride Parade held in Nashville in 2019.
This was taken in 2017 at the Pride Festival in Nashville. It definitely falls in the street photography genre for me.
Journalistic photography and street photography are two very different branches of what might be called life photography. I think it is a disservice to photographers of both genres to use one of them to disparage the other.
Now for a little color theory.
Warm/Cool Colors
One of the interesting things about color harmonies is that they describe relationships of where these colors are on the color wheel. In the case of the warm and cool colors, they each take up one half of the color wheel. The warm colors are red and yellow in hue and the cool colors are green and blue in hue.
We call colors that give off a feeling of heat “warm”, perhaps because they remind us of sunlight. Warm colors can add feelings of passion, energy and motion to our photos.
We call colors that give off a feeling of cold “cool”, perhaps because they remind us of water. Cool colors can create feelings of stillness, calm and freshness.
It is easy to identify the temperatures of non-adjacent colors on the color wheel. It is harder when the colors are adjacent and at the border between warm and cool. In fact, there is not agreement in exactly where the division lies, as shown on the color wheel below. One way to think about whether a color is cool or warm is to look at the underlying bias of the hue. For example, yellow-green (yellow + yellow + blue) is considered a warm color in one division. But in that same division, red-violet (red + red + blue) is shown as a cool color, which does not match the bias of hue. The issue is exactly reversed in the other division of the color wheel. Yellow-green is a cool color and red-violet is a warm color.