It's just a photo...

Street photography often feels like a secret language that only a few of us bother to learn, master and promote. It happens ever so often to me that I'll show a friend a masterfully composed frame, having everything a street photographer might want in it, or a photo book by Joel Meyerowitz, HCB or Alex Webb, and the response is a polite: 'It's just a photo.'

It's a strange isolation. When people stand and look at a painting, they see the weeks of work and elbow grease, the oil and the brush strokes, the layers of colors. When they read a book, they understand the months of years someone put into that piece of art they are holding. But to me, this seems that they are mostly driven by the labor put into something, not only by the quality of that piece of art. People still appreciate a book or a painting even if it is bad. They still see A STORY.

But with photography, the speed of the shutter masks the depth of the craft. They see the 1/500th of a second it took to click, but they don't see the hours of walking, the years of training, the eye to see beauty in the mundane, or the emotional intuition required to anticipate a 'decisive moment' before it vanishes forever, the 99% failure that out work is. They see it as "just a photo".