The Quality of Transience in Street Photography
The idea of transience in street photography is a new idea for me. Vineet Vohra introduced it during the NYC photography workshop in July. I am not sure I am using exactly the right term. It is all I could think of to describe the concept of these two questions that came up during the workshop fairly frequently:
Could you make the same photograph if you walked away and then came back?
Could the next photographer take the same picture?
These questions seem simple, but I think they strike at the heart of an important quality of good street photography. I can even imagine using them as a criterion for a photo even being considered street photography.
I think the absence of transience is one reason I am not too interested in architectural photography.
As I think about transience, I suspect I have brushed up against some issues that, at the very least, are related to it.
I think this is transient. It is going to be unlikely that there will be another photo much like this one.
This is less transient and perhaps not transient at all.
A new street photographer’s first experience with the street photography community’s expectation of transience often occurs when he or she finds that their photo of a street performer is not met with enthusiasm. Street performers do interesting things. They are willing to be photographed. In fact, photographing a street performer is easy pickings in a difficult genre. Perhaps this is even a good place to start practicing the craft of street photography. The problem is that the next photographer will almost surely take essentially the same photo. If you do get a unique photo of a street performer it is certainly not because of the performer. Some other really interesting, non-repeatable transaction has to be going on in the scene.
Yes, I have taken by share of photos of street performers.
The same thing is true when you are using street art as a background. Street art itself creates a very intransient background. Unless you contribute something unique and essentially unrepeatable, you have merely co-opted another artist’s work.
The magnitude of the possible problem of using juxtaposition to take a truly transient photo is laid out in the Instagram account, @streetrepeat. Some of the recent repeatable topics include Tree Hair, Outdoor Chess and Dog Head. The presentation of each topic is done through the posts of three pictures that are strikingly similar. The epitome of the street repeat phenomena, which is that it is hard to create anything that is new and clever in this world, is Balls Replacing Heads.
Certainly the concept of the decisive moment is rooted in transience. If there is truly one moment that is different from all others, it is surely transient.
I think the current interest in using layers in a street photo is a way of staking out transience. The joke in our workshop was that the picture needed a nice bird in the sky or a snake on the ground. If there are multiple points of interest throughout the frame, it is highly unlikely anyone else will be able to get the same photo.
I wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago about using a rating system for street photos. My rating partner in crime, Monica Lord, and I decided to add Transience to our rating system which we use weekly. We now rate on four qualities, Emotion, Composition, Transience and Cognitive Friction. The order signifies the importance of the quality for us. All qualities are rated on a three point scale. For Transience, 1 means not transient, 2 means maybe transient, and 3 means unequivocally transient. We considered moving Transience to the first position and using a two point scale. A photo is either transient or it is not. If it is not, move on. That was what I was alluding to when I wrote above that I can imagine Transience as a criterion for even being a street photo. It is definitely easier to rate Transience with a “it is, or it is not” but in the end, it feels too limiting. Also, we found we could not comfortably use Transience as our make-or-break criteria for street photography.
Photo by Monica Lord. Used with permission. You can see Monica’s Instagram gallery at @almostgreennyc. This is one of my favorite photos that Monica has taken. I think it is unequivocally transient.
The truth of the matter is that I have not totally settled out what I mean by transience. But this I know. In deciding which of my photos should be put out in the world, I am trying to choose ones I could not retake and no one else could either.