This is a list of notable street photographers. Street photography is photography conducted for art or enquiry that presents unmediated chance encounters and random incidents [1] within public places. Street photography does not need the backdrop of a street or even an urban environment. Though people are usually present, street photography may lack people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic. [2]
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Helen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."
Nobuyoshi Araki, professionally known by the mononym Arākii (アラーキー), is a Japanese photographer and contemporary artist. Known primarily for photography that blends eroticism and bondage in a fine art context, he has published over 500 books.
Hiroh Kikai was a Japanese photographer best known within Japan for four series of monochrome photographs: scenes of buildings in and close to Tokyo, portraits of people in the Asakusa area of Tokyo, and rural and town life in India and Turkey. He pursued each of these for over two decades, and each led to one or more book-length collections.
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
Yutaka Takanashi is a Japanese photographer who has photographed fashion, urban design, and city life, and is best known for his depiction of Tokyo.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.
Kikuji Kawada is a Japanese photographer. He co-founded the Vivo photographic collective in 1959. Kawada's books include Chizu and The Last Cosmology (1995). He was included in the New Japanese Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Photographic Society of Japan in 2011.
Masahisa Fukase was a Japanese photographer, celebrated for his work depicting his domestic life with his wife Yōko Wanibe and his regular visits to his parents' small-town photo studio in Hokkaido. He is best known for his 1986 book Karasu, which in 2010 was selected by the British Journal of Photography as the best photobook published between 1986 and 2009. Since his death in 2012 there has been a revival of interest in Fukase's photography, with new books and exhibitions appearing that emphasize the breadth and originality of his art.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.
Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins is a British photographer and member of Magnum Photos, best known for his depictions of Africa, Afghanistan, England, Northern Ireland, and Japan.
Louis Faurer was an American candid or street photographer. He was a quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition that his best-known contemporaries did; however, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, who included his work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions In and Out of Focus (1948) and The Family of Man (1955).
Nikos Economopoulos is a Greek photographer known for his photography of the Balkans and of Greece in particular.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is awarded annually by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Photographers' Gallery to a photographer who has made the most significant contribution to the photographic medium in Europe during the past year.
Maciej Dakowicz is a Polish street photographer, photojournalist and gallerist. He is from Białystok in North East Poland. Dakowicz is best known for his series of photographs of Cardiff night-life titled Cardiff after Dark. He and others set up and ran Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff and he was a member of the In-Public street photography collective.
Carolyn Drake is an American photographer based in Vallejo, California. She works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving. her practice has embraced collaboration, and through this, collage, drawing, sewing, text, and found images have been integrated into her work. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.
Melanie Einzig is an American photographer known for her street photography in and around New York City, where she has lived since 1990. Einzig was a member of the first incarnation of the In-Public street photography collective, from 2002. Her work has been published in the survey publications on street photography, Bystander: A History of Street Photography and Street Photography Now. She has shown in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Somerset House in London; the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany; and KunstHausWien in Vienna, Austria. The Art Institute of Chicago and Brooklyn Historical Society hold examples of her work in their collections.
With the recent publication of Walking London 1965–1988 (Café Royal Books), Benton-Harris looks back at three decades of street photography and street portraiture.
A fast eye, a quick mind and a speedy shutter are essentials for a good street photographer, a breed of picture taker with which Vivian Cherry proudly identifies.
Ms. Cherry's curiosity about people's lives, inspired by the artistry of photographers like Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt and Paul Strand, brought her to the city's streets to take finely observed pictures of immigrants, street vendors, bocce players, construction workers, fruit auctioneers, farriers shoeing Central Park carriage horses, and children watching in amazement as an airplane flew overhead.
When Eamonn Doyle self-published his debut, i, last year, Martin Parr declared it "the best street photobook in a decade."
He became fascinated with photography at the age of nine and, in his teens, signed up for a $6 course at the Photo League and began roaming the streets of New York with his camera
Neil Kenlock and Armet Francis were two radical figures, who took their cameras onto the streets of North Kensington as part of a wider commitment to documenting the lives of African-Caribbean people across London and beyond.
Dave Heath turned moments of solitude into moments of connection and common humanity in his street photography
. . . his poetic images of people glimpsed in streets and public parks
Much of the work on display qualifies as what we now call street photography ... Herzog's street photographs are among the show's surprises, not just because he was shooting in colour way back in the 1950s, but because of the range of his palette.
Herzog, does not claim to be the first color street photographer—for that honor, he cites his contemporary, the more lyrical New York street photographer Saul Leiter—but he was certainly among the first to produce a large volume of color images of this type.
in his free time he's a flâneur, shooting on the street with free rein to react to what he sees and record it as he feels
Chinese photographer Feng Li is known for his hawk-eyed street photography.
He made his name as a street photographer in New York, characteristically up close and personal with faces in a crowd.
He's the guy with a camera, a wry sensibility and a measure of both luck and patience; a San Francisco-based street photographer of Scottish extraction whose work feels like a field guide to how normal things can be really odd, contradictory — and visually rich.
He funded his street photography with various office jobs and by working as a technician. . . .
More recently, country shows have been the hunting ground of street photographer Paul Russell whose eye for a humorous moment is as keen as any you will find.
The street photographer Richard Sandler
The Eyes of the City is Sandler's first retrospective in print. It's an impressive collection, mostly taken between 1977 and 1992 on the streets of New York, with several also in Boston.
Semetko specializes in candid street photography, capturing on-the-fly observations in a series called Unposed. . . .
The great thing about street photography is that all you have to do is step out of your front door with camera in hand and you are up and running. . . . One of the best is Nick Turpin. . . .
Working in the parks, on the streets and at the beaches, he catches his subjects often unawares and usually ignored by everyone else around them. ... Wolff's pictures are typical of the kind of street photography that a whole generation of young photographers has taken to with a passion and abandon that are not encouraging. These photographers are descendants, via Robert Frank, of such grand progenitors as Kertesz and Cartier‐Bresson.