Street Photography: History, Photographers and Techniques

Apr 13

What is street photography?

Street photography shows everyday life in public places: streets, markets, parks, beaches and public transport. The pictures are usually candid and unposed. The photographer does not stage the scene but waits for, or reacts to, a moment of gesture, light or chance. Street photography overlaps with documentary photography, but it is less about a single topic and more about the surprises of ordinary life.

Main approaches

The decisive moment. Waiting for the instant when form and action come together. Henri Cartier-Bresson is the model of this approach.
Fast and crowded. Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander photographed the busy, chaotic American street of the 1960s and 1970s with wide lenses and often tilted frames.
Color and atmosphere. Saul Leiter made soft, painterly color pictures of New York through windows, rain and snow. Joel Meyerowitz helped make color accepted in street photography from the 1960s on.
Light and geometry. Fan Ho photographed Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s with strong light, shadow and lines.
Humor. Elliott Erwitt became known for funny, gentle pictures of people and dogs.
Close and confrontational. Bruce Gilden works very close to strangers, often with flash.

History

Around 1900, Eugène Atget photographed the streets of old Paris with a large view camera, mostly without people. Small cameras changed everything: the Leica, introduced in 1925, used 35mm film and could be carried everywhere. In Paris in the 1930s, Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï and later Robert Doisneau made the city a center of street photography. Cartier-Bresson’s book Images à la sauvette (1952), published in English as The Decisive Moment, gave the approach its best-known name.

In New York, Helen Levitt photographed children playing in the streets from the late 1930s. In 1958 Robert Frank’s The Americans showed a rougher, more personal view of the street. In 1967 the Museum of Modern Art showed Winogrand, Friedlander and Diane Arbus in the exhibition New Documents. In Japan, Daido Moriyama and the magazine Provoke (1968 to 1969) made grainy, blurred street pictures.

In 2007 the collector John Maloof bought boxes of negatives at an auction in Chicago. They were the work of Vivian Maier (1926 to 2009), a nanny who had photographed the streets of New York and Chicago for decades and shown almost nobody. Her story, digital cameras and online communities made street photography one of the most popular genres of the 21st century.

Techniques

Small and quiet. A small camera with a fixed 28mm or 35mm lens draws less attention. Many street photographers use a silent shutter.
Zone focusing. Set focus in advance, for example at three meters with f/8, so that you can shoot without waiting for autofocus.
Find a stage. Choose an interesting background or light, and wait for people to walk into it.
Respect and law. Laws differ: in some countries, such as France, people have strong rights over their image. If someone objects, delete the picture or move on. Be careful when photographing children and vulnerable people.

How to start

Go out often, in your own city, with one camera and one lens. Walk slowly and look for light, gesture and coincidence. Do not hide the camera, smile, and be ready to explain what you are doing. Edit strictly: most street photographers keep only a few pictures a month.

Books to start with

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (1952; facsimile edition Steidl, 2014). The classic book of street photography.
Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (Laurence King). The standard history of the genre.
Vivian Maier: Street Photographer (powerHouse Books, 2011). The first book of Maier’s rediscovered pictures.

Legacy

Street photography has left a detailed record of how cities and people looked over more than a century. Many of its pictures, from Cartier-Bresson’s Paris to Maier’s Chicago, are now classics. Today the genre is practiced around the world, from festivals and collectives to phone cameras, and questions of privacy and consent are part of the discussion.

Discover street photographers · Street photography in the Photopedia Dictionary

Last updated: November 2026

Photopedia

Wolfgang Zurborn

Wolfgang Zurborn is a German photographer, teacher and curator based in Cologne. His book Crowds (Kehrer Verlag, 2026) brings together colour photographs of crowds from the 1980s and 1990s.

David Katzenstein

David Katzenstein is a New York-based photographer whose work has taken him across the world for more than five decades. His book Between One and Another (Hirmer, 2026) brings together 144 photographs from 25 countries.

Jens Krauer

Jens Krauer is a street and documentary photographer based in Zurich. His first book, In Plain Sight (Kehrer Verlag, 2024), gathers ten years of candid photographs from cities around the world.

Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner (1922–2016) was an American photographer who spent his life between New York and Paris. He photographed ordinary people at work, at rest and in the street, and his pictures join American street photography with French humanist photography.

Louis Faurer

Louis Faurer (1916–2001) was an American photographer from Philadelphia who made his best-known pictures on the streets of New York between 1946 and 1951. He earned his living with fashion and magazine work and photographed the city, often at dusk and at night, for himself.

Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (born 1934) is an American photographer from Aberdeen, Washington. Since the 1960s he has photographed what he calls the American social landscape: streets, shop windows, motel rooms, monuments and roadsides.

Ernst Haas

Ernst Haas (1921–1986) was an Austrian-born photographer who helped turn color photography into an art. A member of Magnum Photos from 1949, he became famous with a 24-page color essay on New York in Life magazine in 1953.

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Street Photography: History, Photographers and Techniques

What is street photography?

Main approaches

History

Techniques

How to start

Books to start with

Legacy

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