Seven years have elapsed since the moment I realized that the photographs I had been posting on the net were Street Photographs. No doubt I would have missed this wonderful genre, had it not been for my late exposure to the internet. So I decided to adopt it whole-heartedly. Picture by picture it has revealed to me how amazing the street is: full of thrilling human experiences in every corner, alleyway, and neighborhood, all places where people are to be found.
Seven years have elapsed and I still hurry to the street like a little boy to his playground. The desire to pass every free moment in this playground has not faded with the passage of time. The street is my playground, and people in it are my playthings. The street has its own rules and the passers-by are my unconscious partners in the game. In my game I strive to capture the people and arrange them in various compositions, some more or some less sophisticated that will fit in with my ideas, with the pictures I see in my imagination. It is my imagination that insists on a personal style, the fingerprint unique to each photographer.
The workspace of the street photographer consists of constantly changing population groups. They are continuously on the move, changing day by day, each one having its own purpose and target. Coping constantly with this human flux, and mastery of the language of each group (at times even of a single individual) are necessary if you want to understand people’s behavior and the rules that shape it. A lot of time, patience, and a great deal of contact with different, strange, people are necessary until one acquires the ability to maneuver successfully in the street, inside people’s private territory. Unique ways of seeing, the ability to analyze a situation and react quickly to it, are the tools the street photographer carries with him. His or her personality, experience, intelligence and approach to life are the main weapons in the street. The game here is not a competition between two teams: it is you against the rest of the world, alone but not lonely. You are equipped with that small box, containing the most outstanding collection of playthings in the world.
It is twenty-seven years since I got my first magic box, and it is only now that I have come to realize that all those years have been a long preparation for what still lays ahead, what I have not yet done. Each kilometer I have travelled, each shoe I have worn out, each person I have gotten to know, each picture I have taken, everything I looked for, found, thought, understood, all these and more are the corner-stones on which my street photographer’s personality is built. This personality is what we street photographers bring with us to the playground of street photography. It is with this personality, and only with it, that we confront the rest of the world, with only a little box equipped with an eye of polished glass separating us from the world. Through this magical eye we look at the world, trying to understand it, analyze it, react to it with the intuition unique to each of us, according to our particular view of the world, expressing ourselves through and by it. And she, the camera, is doing her best to capture for us those wonderful magical moments, brought in front of us by our personal traits and imaginations, and that the street in its generosity brings forward and presents to us. No matter what we call this dream catcher, admit that you too have been captured by its magic, and the sweet music of the shutter.
