Does Street Photography Need to Include People?

This question frequently becomes a topic of discussion among photographers.

Many street photographers are of the view that street photography must include people, that candid images of people going about their daily lives are the very essence of street photography. They believe that photos taken on the street that do not include human interactions are not true to the genre.

Others are of the view that any photographs taken on the street, or in a public place, with or without people, can be included under the term street photography. These may include street furniture, signs, shapes and patterns on buildings, and so on. In this view, anything that is found in a public place can be termed street photography.

There is another view that has recently been discussed on some photography forums. It respects both the above viewpoints but suggests that street images that don’t include people could, in the words of UK based photographer Sean Tucker, have ‘hints of human life’. In this approach photographs would have evidence of recent human presence, even if there are no people in the frame. Subjects may be something left behind, something recently used or something that tells a story of human presence even in human absence.

I like this approach and decided to adopt it in recent street photography sessions.

Before I began, I wanted to draw up some parameters.

Firstly, I wanted my photographs to be candid; images of things I randomly came across on the street or in a public place such as a park.

Secondly, I wanted my images to tell a story or to inspire the viewer to make up their own story of what might have occurred. They might include a person but the photograph focusses on the story rather than the person.

Thirdly, I wanted to focus on little details; on objects that others overlook or just walk past. I wanted to pay attention to the potential of discarded objects to tell stories of what is happening on the street.

Finally, for this project I didn’t want to include faces of people, or buildings that involve human influence on a large scale.  My subjects would reflect small, intimate details of life on the street and give clues to the human stories that happen there.

Here are some initial results from my project.

I intend to continue with this project and to build on the bank of images by finding some that are even more relevant to the theme.

Do you think street photography needs to include people?