A short book review along with the philosophy behind Grit Street:
To me, street photography is more than just taking pretty pictures. At its highest level, street photography is about provoking intellectual and social action. I try to weave art, politics, philosophy, and social action into my work. Grit Street Photography is a high-contrast, high-grain, B&W style of street photography that seeks to invoke an emotional, intellectual, social, or political response from the viewer. Grit Street is a mixture of documentary photography, photojournalism, and street photography. Unlike most street photography that we see today – which tends to have no particular objective or message – Grit Street has deliberate psychological, social, and political intentions.
Streetwise: Masters of 60s Photography (English and Spanish Edition)
“Fortunately, there is a pictorial record that documents the tumult of the time, taken by a then young generation of photographers who saw themselves as part of a new frontier of photography. Some fused their heightened social awareness with existing models of documentary photography… In sum, these image-makers produced a distinctly engaged and personalized version of what had come to be known as social-documentary photography, a new and sophisticated postwar [I’ll add “post-modern”] approach embodied in the fresh term ‘street photography.’ … Street photography was viewed as a form of dissent from the depictions both of mass-media photojournalism and of the traditional form of social documentation still being practiced on the Left.” -Andy Grundberg –
Chair of the Photography Department at the Corcoran College of Art and Design