Street Photography Weekly Assignment #6: “Emotion” Winners

Wow, all those haters. I never expected you. Welcome to my life! :)

First of all, I am very happy to have won this assignment. And like some of you I look at the other pictures and think, they are pretty good, too.

I do like #2 because it is stronger in terms of raw emotion. There is obviously fear or sadness in those faces.

But here is the thing: we never find out why. There is no context. There is no story.

The same is true for #3. That boy is shouting something. What? Why? At whom?

What sets #1 apart is a story line, a narrative that connects the subject with his environment. And yes, he did rub his eyes. But not in the way you rub your eyes when the wind blew some dirt into them. That person is a street musician. His accordeon is sitting on the sidewalk just out of frame. When I walked by he was taking a break from playing and resting his head in his hand for a long time. It was a mixture of fatigue, despair and sadness. And that is what spoke to me.

There were a lot of wealthy people around him. Those able to buy Bentleys for example. And there he was, all alone, with a few coins in his pocket. That was the moment and that is the story. Not all of it is contained in the picture, of course. But there is enough to get the point across. And that’s why it’s #1.

I don’t believe the problem of the person in the first photo is money or things to have. Let’s see the belly of the model. What he needs is the bike on a reflection in the window. The car makes people looking ugly.

In my opinion, people tend to look at or think about something from their experience. I’ve read all articles here and seen so many photos called street photography for a long time, and found out many street photographers don’t even know themselves what they took, however mimicing cheapy emotion on the internet. As you may know, I was disappointed by the emotion of a person who picked that photo as the first place.

I suggest people study drawing or painting for having a good composition and color, and study philosophy.

And.. I didn’t apply any photo for this assignment don’t get me wrong

I always have disliked images with that typical ambiguous pose where some random person is sitting in the street covering their face or looking down into the ground. Too often the “story” in these scenes is stretched by the photographer WAY too much. To me, this man looks like he is just taking a rest, or cleaning something out from his eye. If he was facing the car, if he was interacting with it in any way you would have a stronger case. As it is, said interaction does not exist and therefore the sad story of the man who cannot afford a penis implant only lives in the photographer’s head. Or maybe also in the heads of those with a materialist-driven character?

In my opinion, reading these scenes as “guy is suffering for whatever thing I chose to use as juxta” is simplistic and too commonplace in the street photography world. You guys were talking about how some lies are better than others. I would say this one is a poorly told lie, one that I do not believe regardless of how good it might be.

Second shot is better. At least the emotions shown there seem honest and real. It does not need some convoluted description to bring the point to the viewer. It is more dynamic, it has key information in different planes, it fills the frame better. Overall, a stronger shot.