**The Power of Street Photography: A Love Letter to the Genre**

For me, street photography is more than just a genre - it's an art form that speaks to something deep within my soul. There's something about capturing the human experience, the beauty in everyday life, and the complexities of our society that resonates with me on a profound level.

When I think of influential books in this field, one that comes to mind is "Lestrada." This little-known gem is a body of work that has had a significant impact on my photography. It's hard to move books, especially those that are not commercially viable, but when you see them, you want to get them because they're really expensive and difficult to find later once they become rare. "Lestrada" is probably one of the most influential books I've ever gotten, as it introduced me to a new perspective on photography.

**Post-War Italian Photography School**

Another book that has had a profound impact on my understanding of street photography is "Post-War Italian Photography School." This collection showcases some of the most iconic photographers from this period, including work by artists who were truly ahead of their time. For me, it's a testament to the power of innovation and experimentation in the world of photography.

One photographer who stands out to me from this era is Garry Winogrand. Winogrand was an amazing photographer who captured the essence of modern life with his camera. His work is reminiscent of Robert Frank's, but with a slightly different tone. Winogrand's use of wide-angle lenses and his ability to capture the nuances of human behavior are truly remarkable.

I've heard stories from friends who have studied with Winogrand himself, and they describe him as someone who was absolutely obsessed with photography. He would shoot all day, every day, without fail. This level of dedication is something that I aspire to in my own work, and it's a testament to the power of passion and obsession when it comes to creative pursuits.

**Gary Winogrand: A Passionate Photographer**

Winogrand's photography is a reflection of his passion for capturing the world around him. He had a unique approach to street photography that was both innovative and refreshing. His work often featured people in unexpected situations, and he was not afraid to experiment with different techniques and styles.

One story that I've heard about Winogrand is how he attended a football game one night while on crutches, despite his injured ankle. He wanted to capture the energy of the crowd and the atmosphere of the event, even if it meant enduring some discomfort. This level of dedication and commitment to his craft is something that I admire greatly.

**Joel Meyerowitz: A Master of Color**

For my final pick, I want to highlight Joel Meyerowitz's incredible body of work. Meyerowitz is a master of color, and his photographs are a testament to the power of light and composition. He has a unique interpretation of color that sets him apart from other photographers.

One thing that stands out about Meyerowitz's photography is its sense of nostalgia. His work often captures the essence of New York City in the 80s, which was a time of great change and upheaval. Despite this, his photographs are imbued with a sense of calm and serenity that is truly remarkable.

Meyerowitz's use of color is also noteworthy. He has a way of capturing the subtleties of light and shadow that adds depth and complexity to his images. His photography is not just about documenting the world around him; it's about creating a mood, a atmosphere, and an emotional response in the viewer.

As I finish writing this article, I'm reminded of the importance of street photography in capturing the human experience. It's not just about pointing a camera at people on the street; it's about telling a story, conveying emotion, and creating something beautiful. Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just starting out, I hope that these examples have inspired you to pick up your camera and capture the world around you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everyone in this video we are going to do something a little bit old school and i'm going to talk about street photography let's get into my top 10. now i know that i will leave somebody out and i can see the comments now well how come you didn't talk about so and so or whatever there's only 10 people i'm putting into this list and this is who is influencing me currently so yes there are other photographers that i'm aware of if i didn't cover your favorite please don't be offended with me but let's jump in so number one is going to be a photographer that i think that at least is new to me it was somebody i was unfamiliar with until recently this is charles negra who was a french photographer somebody that i was largely unfamiliar with until recently when i read an article and they were considering him to be one of the earliest examples of street photography this is a really interesting example this is a group of chimney sweeps one of his best known images this is from 1852. stop right there and think about this for a second 1852 is really early and when you consider what we know as the first photograph for the oldest surviving photograph the nesophorniapps rooftop in france that was 1820 something 1826 or so so this isn't much later and my point is is today we're spoiled by just a very different technology set not only with digital photography but even if you still shoot film the technology is very different and we are at the luxury of shooting at very high iso settings so freezing action is not really a problem today it was back then because when you consider that this was probably done on an emulsion that had an iso of about six not 600 not 66 this is really slow and you can kind of tell because the super shallow depth of field that happens in these images i'm not really sure what he was using in terms of equipment but these were lenses that were designed i'm sure these were large formats so it was a big negative but these were lenses that were designed to let a lot of light in and there's this kind of funky dreamlike quality to it that makes them have a lot of character but i think it's just amazing work and it's really impressive from a technical standpoint of what he was able to pull off with these also when you consider 1852 there was really no precedent for the type of work that he was doing now charles negro was actually trained as a painter that's what he did for living and he considered photography as a way to collect reference material that he could take into the studio later and paint from that's also a very early concept for 1852 maybe 1952 that's normal but a hundred years earlier that was really rare so from a historical perspective sure this probably is one of the earliest examples of street photography number two on our list today would be henrique cartier-bresson i have covered cartier-bresson to death on this channel so i'm not going to go too far into it today other than he's somebody that i am still inspired by and always will be i mean it's just that work never gets old to me he's somebody with an extraordinary level of talent that was able to take a lot of these classical design aesthetic examples of rule of thirds uh line form composition even dynamic symmetry it gets pretty involved and he was able to put these into something that was a more improvised context his photography always reminds me of jazz music in that way because you have improvisation that is happening with design constraints around it he was absolutely brilliant there are very few people who have ever done it to the level that he's done and so he is definitely one of my favorites number three on this list is w eugene smith this is also somebody that i have covered a lot on this channel i'll link to some videos below and i'm still inspired by him today i think the thing that i love the most about w eugene smith is that one his intensity uh taking on projects that he would become just obsessive about now he worked in the commercial world he had an attitude that was a little bit of abrasive and let's just say he didn't get along with people a lot and it did cause trouble but to take a project like the pittsburgh project that he did and to become so obsessed that you end up spending way too much time there with thousands of images that are all incredible and there's really no way to present them in a book because they're just too many of them it would be volumes and everything that i've seen at least and i know that i've only scratched the surface i think most people haven't seen that entire body of work it's it's fascinating to me and i think that's one thing about w gene smith is that as i kind of go through my career in my life there are different things about smith because he had a lot of depth to him that begin to influence me and inspire me and i think the biggest one now is the jazz loft project which was not a commercial project he simply moved into a loft in new york city and wired the thing for sound there are thousands of hours of audio that exists there are thousands of photographs you know the biggest names in jazz would come jam at this loft into the wee hours of the morning it's the documentation aspect that inspires me from that and i know that's not really classical street photography in that it's indoors and aloft but it's capturing that moment in time and i think that's something that's really important and really special number four this is somebody who's not really in the classical definition of being a street photographer per se but another documentation photographer and one of my favorites would be gordon parks gordon parks was simply amazing there is a part of his canon of work of work that was shot in the south that covered the african-american experience with segregation these are powerful images they're really strong they say a lot visually i think this is some outstanding work that really you didn't see from anybody else and i think from gordon having lived that experience and being able to communicate that another favorite project of mine and this definitely wouldn't be thought of as street photography because it was all set up but it was a photo illustration for a book called the invisible man which is a fictional book but this is images that put together to tell a story and it's still documenting an experience even though it's fiction and so this definitely wouldn't be what the purists are going to define as street photography but these images are so powerful and so strong and gordon parks is just i mean he's one of the greats he was a huge influence on me number five is robert frank who was a new york-based photographer probably best known for this little book that he did called the americans where he traveled across the united states in the 1950s and captured a very different side of american life than what you would see in commercial media or magazines at that time i think that robert frank was amazing because in many ways he was the complete opposite of henri cartier-bresson arnold cartier-bresson was about rules and classical composition and incorporating that into his work robert frank was about being raw and being ugly and holding the camera not straight sometimes and the images are a little bit messy and they're a little bit confrontational and they're designed that way they're there for the viewer to feel a little bit uncomfortable and uneasy with i think he was one of the most amazing ever and again i've done videos on him look in the show description if you want to see more number six i mentioned earlier but it would be saul lighter and saul is somebody who is an enormous influence on me in terms of the output of color work that he did now this was stuff that he wasn't known for at the time it was stuff that he was collecting and throwing under the bed and shoe boxes it was slides of kodachrome with this highly experimental work that he was doing with color now you also have to remember that at this time in the 1950s 1960s that there was a little bit of a stigma in the art world where color photography was a gimmick the only real photography or pure photography would have been black and white and so i think there are a number of reasons why maybe he was experimenting with that on a personal level and it didn't really become known to the world until late like the 1990s a couple years before he actually passed away there's a great film on saul that i will link up to as well he's an enormous influence on me saul is the man skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people like you it is a place to explore new skills you can deepen existing passions and basically just get lost in creativity are you holed up at home spontaneous acts of creativity may help break up the routine of a day spent indoors explore some workshops and classes to help you get out of that rut so one class that i've been looking at a lot this week is street photography unlock the secrets of composition color and confidence this one is taught by craig whitehead who you guys might actually know i've featured him on the show a number of times he goes under the moniker sixth street under on various social platforms this class is excellent as i would expect no less from craig he's a fabulous photographer with a really good understanding of the history of what's come before him but he adds his own personal spin on the top he is an excellent photographer this class is going to teach you things like having confidence preparing to shoot being able to pre-visualizing the scene capturing fleeting moments playing with abstraction making selects editing and everything and so i really recommend this craig is an awesome guy you may be able to check out this class absolutely free and here's how so the first 1000 people to use the link below in this video will get a two-month free trial of skillshare premium membership skillshare is curated specifically for learning so this means there's no ads and that they're always launching new premium classes so that you can stay focused and follow wherever creativity takes you so use the link below check them out and learn something new today and i want to give a special shout out and thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this episode of the art of photography number seven is not actually an individual but i'm gonna talk about a school of photography for the lack of a better term not like a physical school where you go learn but a school of thought and so in the 1950s 1960s new york city was the mecca of anything that was happening not only in the art world but also the commercial world in the art world you have abstract expressionism going on with mark rothko jackson pollock vm de kooning and then in the photography world you have something that's very interesting because it's crossing down the line between the commercial work being produced on madison avenue with the likes of richard avedon or irving penn and then you have other photographers who are doing work for magazines too as freelancers but not nearly as well known they're also doing an extraordinary body of personal work and there's some really wonderful photographers that come out of that people like ted croner who had these wonderful blurry shots of night scenes in new york city or you have louis ferreira who's doing something that's kind of more with the sensibility of somebody like deann arbus and so there's some really interesting wonderful work that's coming out of here there's another group that i'm going to lump in with the new york school but it's really its own thing called comoenge komoenge is probably one of the greatest photo groups that you probably never heard of this was an african-american photo group that was put together in the early 1960s by a brilliant photographer by the name of louis draper louis draper was an excellent photographer in his own right and because of these sensibilities and stereotypes unfortunately of the time it was very hard for these individuals to get their work out to be seen so louis draper in conjunction with roy decarva and a couple other photographers put together this group that they later named kamen gaye now komenke still exists today and includes photographers like eli reed who is somebody that i have an enormous amount of respect for i know him through some of the sony stuff because he's a sony ambassador eli reed was the first african-american magnum photographer he is just absolutely brilliant but the body of work that they were producing at this time gives us a very different view again much like the sensibilities that you would see of somebody like gordon parks we're seeing new york city in the 1960s through the eyes of the african-american experience and i think there's some really wonderful work that is sadly under-appreciated and overlooked now i'm hoping that this will probably change i did notice when i was researching this that the whitney museum has announced an exhibition coming up the dates are to be announced because they're obviously still shut down at the moment planning on reopening in september but um i think that this is a very underappreciated body of work that needs more exposure number eight is also going to be a school of thought so to speak this is going to be the italian post-war school this is a book called lestrada which is a compilation of italian photography post-world war ii that i found in a used bookstore years and years ago that literally changed my approach to many things in photography i've done a whole video on this and i'll link to it in the show description but the only photographer that i was familiar with was paulo monty who is a very well-known italian photographer not so much for street work surprisingly even though that was in this compilation but there are people like mario yakomeri paolo bocci valentino bassanini there's literally some of the most beautiful street photography in the classical henri cartier-bresson tradition that i have seen anywhere and i didn't even know this existed until i just randomly came across this book one day when you go through the text of the book it kind of explains it and part of the problem is that these guys were not of their time a lot of the work that's produced in lestrada these were photographers who were greatly influenced by life magazine vogue magazine henry cartier so on the work that they were seeing during the period of world war ii and they continued to shoot in that style even locally and professionally and unfortunately the history has a really weird way of looking back on it is even though it's incredible work it's just not of its moment in the same way so it's going to be a little more of a sleeper and a little more of a insider kind of thing but i highly recommend lestrada which brings me to another frustration oftentimes when i cover these videos where i show you a book the way that publishers work is these books are not around for long they're short run they just it's hard to move books it's hard to sell them and so they're not very commercially viable when you see them you want to get them because they're really expensive and really difficult to find later once they become rare but if you can ever run across a copy of lestrada it is highly recommended in fact that book is probably one of the most influential books that i've ever gotten because it's just this body of work i didn't know about it's like here's all this classic street photography work and here's this little hidden gem of this stuff you didn't know existed so that's my post-war italian photography school it's pretty incredible number eight i've got to mention gary winogrand gary was an amazing photographer probably more in the vein of robert frank in the work that he was doing not quite as confrontational but definitely more progressive in terms of camera angle gary shot a lot with a wide angle lens and one thing that's interesting about gary is he had the obsession of a w eugene smith at one point in his career gary winogrand taught photography at the university of texas in austin i actually have a friend who studied with him back in the 70s and i've asked him over and over again to tell me stories about gary winogrand and he said he was just like nobody else he was just obsessed with photographing all the time he said at one point a bunch of them went to a football game one night and gary had broken his ankle or something and he was there on crutches down on the field with his camera shooting the audience and shooting the football game and they were all like gary uh why don't you take a break tonight and he was like well who else is going to document this so i love the passion that goes into stuff like that and i love the obsession i love the fact that that somebody like a gary winograd or a w jane smith just can't not shoot and i i'm not on that level most of us aren't but it's something that i aspire to do i love that kind of passion that goes into something which brings us to my number 10 pick which is joel meyerowitz joel meyerowitz is a fabulous photographer he's somebody that i would love to meet one day i've never crossed paths with him i think he's just a brilliant photographer there is a sensibility in his work that comes across where again i think his earlier stuff particularly the period where he was living in new york city is really revered as wonderful street photography it's a little bit of a different time period than all the other stuff we've talked about obviously it's kind of the book into the charles negra that i was talking about earlier where he's one of the earliest examples well joel meyerowitz is still working today and throughout the 80s he had this way of documenting new york in color which again has a nostalgia that's of its time which i think turns into this thing where if we look at street photography and the purists are going to put this defined category if it has to be within a certain period it has to be this or it has to be that nostalgia is something that i don't know if it's it definitely plays into it and i think that if you're looking at the gallery world in terms of what's going to sell in terms of street photography nostalgia has to be there and so i find it interesting because somebody like joel meyerowitz you look at his work being a little bit more recent than the rest of these guys and it makes you realize you need to be documenting things now and you need to be creating your own street photography or your own documentational work because eventually you'll wish you had because that nostalgic kicks in at some point in time but i think joel is fabulous he had an incredible interpretation of color i think also light and i think shooting street photography particularly with the technology that we have today and even in color and even if you move this into digital you want light to be a predominant part of that you go look at a lot of the old black and white stuff that was shot at night that's definitely deliberate for a certain reason and i think that joel myrowitz just gives you something different with all that he's an incredible photographer so i'm going to leave it there this got a little long i knew it would because you get me talking about some of my favorite guys and that's where i go and i'm sure i left somebody out that's important and there'll be somebody that i wake up tomorrow and think oh wait a minute i left so-and-so out so anyway that's it for today i would love to know what you guys think drop me a comment below i'll see in the next video until then laterwelcome back everyone in this video we are going to do something a little bit old school and i'm going to talk about street photography let's get into my top 10. now i know that i will leave somebody out and i can see the comments now well how come you didn't talk about so and so or whatever there's only 10 people i'm putting into this list and this is who is influencing me currently so yes there are other photographers that i'm aware of if i didn't cover your favorite please don't be offended with me but let's jump in so number one is going to be a photographer that i think that at least is new to me it was somebody i was unfamiliar with until recently this is charles negra who was a french photographer somebody that i was largely unfamiliar with until recently when i read an article and they were considering him to be one of the earliest examples of street photography this is a really interesting example this is a group of chimney sweeps one of his best known images this is from 1852. stop right there and think about this for a second 1852 is really early and when you consider what we know as the first photograph for the oldest surviving photograph the nesophorniapps rooftop in france that was 1820 something 1826 or so so this isn't much later and my point is is today we're spoiled by just a very different technology set not only with digital photography but even if you still shoot film the technology is very different and we are at the luxury of shooting at very high iso settings so freezing action is not really a problem today it was back then because when you consider that this was probably done on an emulsion that had an iso of about six not 600 not 66 this is really slow and you can kind of tell because the super shallow depth of field that happens in these images i'm not really sure what he was using in terms of equipment but these were lenses that were designed i'm sure these were large formats so it was a big negative but these were lenses that were designed to let a lot of light in and there's this kind of funky dreamlike quality to it that makes them have a lot of character but i think it's just amazing work and it's really impressive from a technical standpoint of what he was able to pull off with these also when you consider 1852 there was really no precedent for the type of work that he was doing now charles negro was actually trained as a painter that's what he did for living and he considered photography as a way to collect reference material that he could take into the studio later and paint from that's also a very early concept for 1852 maybe 1952 that's normal but a hundred years earlier that was really rare so from a historical perspective sure this probably is one of the earliest examples of street photography number two on our list today would be henrique cartier-bresson i have covered cartier-bresson to death on this channel so i'm not going to go too far into it today other than he's somebody that i am still inspired by and always will be i mean it's just that work never gets old to me he's somebody with an extraordinary level of talent that was able to take a lot of these classical design aesthetic examples of rule of thirds uh line form composition even dynamic symmetry it gets pretty involved and he was able to put these into something that was a more improvised context his photography always reminds me of jazz music in that way because you have improvisation that is happening with design constraints around it he was absolutely brilliant there are very few people who have ever done it to the level that he's done and so he is definitely one of my favorites number three on this list is w eugene smith this is also somebody that i have covered a lot on this channel i'll link to some videos below and i'm still inspired by him today i think the thing that i love the most about w eugene smith is that one his intensity uh taking on projects that he would become just obsessive about now he worked in the commercial world he had an attitude that was a little bit of abrasive and let's just say he didn't get along with people a lot and it did cause trouble but to take a project like the pittsburgh project that he did and to become so obsessed that you end up spending way too much time there with thousands of images that are all incredible and there's really no way to present them in a book because they're just too many of them it would be volumes and everything that i've seen at least and i know that i've only scratched the surface i think most people haven't seen that entire body of work it's it's fascinating to me and i think that's one thing about w gene smith is that as i kind of go through my career in my life there are different things about smith because he had a lot of depth to him that begin to influence me and inspire me and i think the biggest one now is the jazz loft project which was not a commercial project he simply moved into a loft in new york city and wired the thing for sound there are thousands of hours of audio that exists there are thousands of photographs you know the biggest names in jazz would come jam at this loft into the wee hours of the morning it's the documentation aspect that inspires me from that and i know that's not really classical street photography in that it's indoors and aloft but it's capturing that moment in time and i think that's something that's really important and really special number four this is somebody who's not really in the classical definition of being a street photographer per se but another documentation photographer and one of my favorites would be gordon parks gordon parks was simply amazing there is a part of his canon of work of work that was shot in the south that covered the african-american experience with segregation these are powerful images they're really strong they say a lot visually i think this is some outstanding work that really you didn't see from anybody else and i think from gordon having lived that experience and being able to communicate that another favorite project of mine and this definitely wouldn't be thought of as street photography because it was all set up but it was a photo illustration for a book called the invisible man which is a fictional book but this is images that put together to tell a story and it's still documenting an experience even though it's fiction and so this definitely wouldn't be what the purists are going to define as street photography but these images are so powerful and so strong and gordon parks is just i mean he's one of the greats he was a huge influence on me number five is robert frank who was a new york-based photographer probably best known for this little book that he did called the americans where he traveled across the united states in the 1950s and captured a very different side of american life than what you would see in commercial media or magazines at that time i think that robert frank was amazing because in many ways he was the complete opposite of henri cartier-bresson arnold cartier-bresson was about rules and classical composition and incorporating that into his work robert frank was about being raw and being ugly and holding the camera not straight sometimes and the images are a little bit messy and they're a little bit confrontational and they're designed that way they're there for the viewer to feel a little bit uncomfortable and uneasy with i think he was one of the most amazing ever and again i've done videos on him look in the show description if you want to see more number six i mentioned earlier but it would be saul lighter and saul is somebody who is an enormous influence on me in terms of the output of color work that he did now this was stuff that he wasn't known for at the time it was stuff that he was collecting and throwing under the bed and shoe boxes it was slides of kodachrome with this highly experimental work that he was doing with color now you also have to remember that at this time in the 1950s 1960s that there was a little bit of a stigma in the art world where color photography was a gimmick the only real photography or pure photography would have been black and white and so i think there are a number of reasons why maybe he was experimenting with that on a personal level and it didn't really become known to the world until late like the 1990s a couple years before he actually passed away there's a great film on saul that i will link up to as well he's an enormous influence on me saul is the man skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people like you it is a place to explore new skills you can deepen existing passions and basically just get lost in creativity are you holed up at home spontaneous acts of creativity may help break up the routine of a day spent indoors explore some workshops and classes to help you get out of that rut so one class that i've been looking at a lot this week is street photography unlock the secrets of composition color and confidence this one is taught by craig whitehead who you guys might actually know i've featured him on the show a number of times he goes under the moniker sixth street under on various social platforms this class is excellent as i would expect no less from craig he's a fabulous photographer with a really good understanding of the history of what's come before him but he adds his own personal spin on the top he is an excellent photographer this class is going to teach you things like having confidence preparing to shoot being able to pre-visualizing the scene capturing fleeting moments playing with abstraction making selects editing and everything and so i really recommend this craig is an awesome guy you may be able to check out this class absolutely free and here's how so the first 1000 people to use the link below in this video will get a two-month free trial of skillshare premium membership skillshare is curated specifically for learning so this means there's no ads and that they're always launching new premium classes so that you can stay focused and follow wherever creativity takes you so use the link below check them out and learn something new today and i want to give a special shout out and thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this episode of the art of photography number seven is not actually an individual but i'm gonna talk about a school of photography for the lack of a better term not like a physical school where you go learn but a school of thought and so in the 1950s 1960s new york city was the mecca of anything that was happening not only in the art world but also the commercial world in the art world you have abstract expressionism going on with mark rothko jackson pollock vm de kooning and then in the photography world you have something that's very interesting because it's crossing down the line between the commercial work being produced on madison avenue with the likes of richard avedon or irving penn and then you have other photographers who are doing work for magazines too as freelancers but not nearly as well known they're also doing an extraordinary body of personal work and there's some really wonderful photographers that come out of that people like ted croner who had these wonderful blurry shots of night scenes in new york city or you have louis ferreira who's doing something that's kind of more with the sensibility of somebody like deann arbus and so there's some really interesting wonderful work that's coming out of here there's another group that i'm going to lump in with the new york school but it's really its own thing called comoenge komoenge is probably one of the greatest photo groups that you probably never heard of this was an african-american photo group that was put together in the early 1960s by a brilliant photographer by the name of louis draper louis draper was an excellent photographer in his own right and because of these sensibilities and stereotypes unfortunately of the time it was very hard for these individuals to get their work out to be seen so louis draper in conjunction with roy decarva and a couple other photographers put together this group that they later named kamen gaye now komenke still exists today and includes photographers like eli reed who is somebody that i have an enormous amount of respect for i know him through some of the sony stuff because he's a sony ambassador eli reed was the first african-american magnum photographer he is just absolutely brilliant but the body of work that they were producing at this time gives us a very different view again much like the sensibilities that you would see of somebody like gordon parks we're seeing new york city in the 1960s through the eyes of the african-american experience and i think there's some really wonderful work that is sadly under-appreciated and overlooked now i'm hoping that this will probably change i did notice when i was researching this that the whitney museum has announced an exhibition coming up the dates are to be announced because they're obviously still shut down at the moment planning on reopening in september but um i think that this is a very underappreciated body of work that needs more exposure number eight is also going to be a school of thought so to speak this is going to be the italian post-war school this is a book called lestrada which is a compilation of italian photography post-world war ii that i found in a used bookstore years and years ago that literally changed my approach to many things in photography i've done a whole video on this and i'll link to it in the show description but the only photographer that i was familiar with was paulo monty who is a very well-known italian photographer not so much for street work surprisingly even though that was in this compilation but there are people like mario yakomeri paolo bocci valentino bassanini there's literally some of the most beautiful street photography in the classical henri cartier-bresson tradition that i have seen anywhere and i didn't even know this existed until i just randomly came across this book one day when you go through the text of the book it kind of explains it and part of the problem is that these guys were not of their time a lot of the work that's produced in lestrada these were photographers who were greatly influenced by life magazine vogue magazine henry cartier so on the work that they were seeing during the period of world war ii and they continued to shoot in that style even locally and professionally and unfortunately the history has a really weird way of looking back on it is even though it's incredible work it's just not of its moment in the same way so it's going to be a little more of a sleeper and a little more of a insider kind of thing but i highly recommend lestrada which brings me to another frustration oftentimes when i cover these videos where i show you a book the way that publishers work is these books are not around for long they're short run they just it's hard to move books it's hard to sell them and so they're not very commercially viable when you see them you want to get them because they're really expensive and really difficult to find later once they become rare but if you can ever run across a copy of lestrada it is highly recommended in fact that book is probably one of the most influential books that i've ever gotten because it's just this body of work i didn't know about it's like here's all this classic street photography work and here's this little hidden gem of this stuff you didn't know existed so that's my post-war italian photography school it's pretty incredible number eight i've got to mention gary winogrand gary was an amazing photographer probably more in the vein of robert frank in the work that he was doing not quite as confrontational but definitely more progressive in terms of camera angle gary shot a lot with a wide angle lens and one thing that's interesting about gary is he had the obsession of a w eugene smith at one point in his career gary winogrand taught photography at the university of texas in austin i actually have a friend who studied with him back in the 70s and i've asked him over and over again to tell me stories about gary winogrand and he said he was just like nobody else he was just obsessed with photographing all the time he said at one point a bunch of them went to a football game one night and gary had broken his ankle or something and he was there on crutches down on the field with his camera shooting the audience and shooting the football game and they were all like gary uh why don't you take a break tonight and he was like well who else is going to document this so i love the passion that goes into stuff like that and i love the obsession i love the fact that that somebody like a gary winograd or a w jane smith just can't not shoot and i i'm not on that level most of us aren't but it's something that i aspire to do i love that kind of passion that goes into something which brings us to my number 10 pick which is joel meyerowitz joel meyerowitz is a fabulous photographer he's somebody that i would love to meet one day i've never crossed paths with him i think he's just a brilliant photographer there is a sensibility in his work that comes across where again i think his earlier stuff particularly the period where he was living in new york city is really revered as wonderful street photography it's a little bit of a different time period than all the other stuff we've talked about obviously it's kind of the book into the charles negra that i was talking about earlier where he's one of the earliest examples well joel meyerowitz is still working today and throughout the 80s he had this way of documenting new york in color which again has a nostalgia that's of its time which i think turns into this thing where if we look at street photography and the purists are going to put this defined category if it has to be within a certain period it has to be this or it has to be that nostalgia is something that i don't know if it's it definitely plays into it and i think that if you're looking at the gallery world in terms of what's going to sell in terms of street photography nostalgia has to be there and so i find it interesting because somebody like joel meyerowitz you look at his work being a little bit more recent than the rest of these guys and it makes you realize you need to be documenting things now and you need to be creating your own street photography or your own documentational work because eventually you'll wish you had because that nostalgic kicks in at some point in time but i think joel is fabulous he had an incredible interpretation of color i think also light and i think shooting street photography particularly with the technology that we have today and even in color and even if you move this into digital you want light to be a predominant part of that you go look at a lot of the old black and white stuff that was shot at night that's definitely deliberate for a certain reason and i think that joel myrowitz just gives you something different with all that he's an incredible photographer so i'm going to leave it there this got a little long i knew it would because you get me talking about some of my favorite guys and that's where i go and i'm sure i left somebody out that's important and there'll be somebody that i wake up tomorrow and think oh wait a minute i left so-and-so out so anyway that's it for today i would love to know what you guys think drop me a comment below i'll see in the next video until then later\n"