The other day, February 1, was the birthday of the American photo artist Vivian Mayer, whose name was inscribed in the history of street photography not so long ago - in 2009. Then the world unexpectedly and quite accidentally opened her photo archives of the life of America in the 1950s and 70s. The birthday of the photographer, whose name immediately stood on a par with such classics of documentary photography as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Smith and Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, falls exactly at the height of the new fashion season and falls between the final of Paris Haute Couture and the Weeks pret-a-porter, which New York used this year to complete the menswear marathon. In short, the hottest time for street photographers who have radically changed the fashion industry over the past ten years.
The guests of the shows, trying to outstrip each other with their outfits, today are no less, and even more important newsmakers of Fashion Weeks than the designers themselves. Why spend money on high quality filming to showcase a hot trend when you can provide a selection of street style? In 2013, Susie Menkes called this whole motley pack "fashionable circus." However, it did not start at all in the arena.
To substantiate the street style boom of the 2010s, just name a few names: Face Hunter founder Ivan Rodick, Jak & Jil father Tommy Ton, and The Sartorialist founder Scott Schumann, who shifted the focus of fashion photography from ideal body to style. It is no coincidence that the key characters of The Sartorialist were freaks who a priori attracted attention, representatives of all kinds of subcultures and the underground, transvestites and other "non-format" by classic glossy standards. So, in many ways, it was the street style genre that determined the massive appearance on the catwalk of older models, plus-size models and models with disabilities. Photographers, snatching bright passers-by from the crowd, gave everyone the opportunity to feel like a model and gave the go-ahead to their form of self-expression.
If Scott Schumann preferred a street portrait, then Tommy took horizontal shots with the most catchy details of the image. The urge to hit the camera has spawned a crowd of fashion bloggers who rushed to post their daily fashion spasms. The freakier the better. So naturalness and realism disappeared from street style, but the picture did not cease to be less attractive from this. Already in 2009, the first row of key shows, along with fashion editors, were taken by Garanz Dore, Brian Boy, Susie Bubble, Tavi Gevinson and other blogging pioneers.
However, their names did not come out of nowhere. If you do not dwell on the name of Edward Lynn Sambourne with his The Edwardian Sartorialist and hand-drawn illustrations in the spirit of "Dandy on the Skating Rink" - yellow pantaloons, blue tailcoats and that's all - we can say that the first surge in the development of the genre of street photography is due to the emergence and spread of small 35mm rangefinder cameras. This gave the world the classics of street photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Alfred Eisenstadt, Eugene Smith, William Eggleston, Manuel Rivera-Ortiz and Harry Winogrand. As mentioned above, in 2009 the name Vivian Mayer was added to this row.
Vivian took pictures all her life, but did not show her work to anyone. Snapping off two hundred films a year, she developed them in her own room, turning it into a darkroom. Mayer worked as a nanny in Chicago for almost 40 years. During this time, she managed to accumulate more than 2,000 rolls of film, 3,000 photographs and 100,000 negatives, which no one knew about during her lifetime. Her photographs remained unknown, and the films - undeveloped and unprinted, before they were unveiled in 2007 at auction in a Chicago auction house. Due to non-payment, her archive boxes, full of negatives, which soon made a splash, went under the hammer.
However, street and fashion were not connected until the reportage style penetrated fashion photography. This happened only in the middle of the 20th century, when the refined static studio image was corrected by the "documentary" tendency: motionless models, shot mainly indoors, in the studio or in the interior, were now depicted in motion in the most unpredictable locations.
Martin Munkacci is considered to be the initiator of the new documentary style of fashion photography in the 1950s. As a sports photographer, he brought movement and spontaneity to fashion photography. Munkacsi's work had a huge impact on the entire subsequent generation of photography, but above all on Richard Avedon. It was he who, for the first time in history, brought models out of the studio to the street, breaking with the classic static photographs of the 1930s. Without his famous 1947 shot of a model in a Christian Dior bar jacket, there would be no street style today.
The Avedon case was continued by David Bailey, and then by Diana Arbus, who made a name for herself on the set for Harper's Bazaar and switched to street misfits. The name of these pioneers with modern street style connects Bill Cunningham, who managed to catch both the first steps of street style and its boom. For forty years, Bill has worked on news coverage for The New York Times' weekly On the Street column. Cunningham published his first collection of street photographs there back in 1978, when he managed to take some pictures of Greta Garbo strolling through New York.
In the 80s, the iconic British i-D promoted the deliberately realistic, rejecting retouching and cultivating the imperfection of heroes. Predictable: After all, the magazine is all about avant-garde fashion, music, art and youth culture. Founded by designer Terry Jones in 1980, the first i-D saw the light of day as an amateur fanzine hand-stitched with typewritten text. Of course, it was dedicated to the street style of the punk era in London. It was filmed for the magazine by Nick Knight, Jurgen Teller and Ellen von Unwerth. In the same 80s, James Shabuzz diversified the history of street photography with shots of the heroes of Brooklyn, Soichi Aoki in the 90s opened the street style of Tokyo to the world, well, then you yourself saw everything.
Today, in an era when a person looks at the world through the lens of an iPhone, and every first becomes a photographer, it is increasingly difficult to find something truly new in the genre of street photography. However, new classics of the genre still have a place to be. These street photographers call the Portuguese Rui Pal, the Indian Manish Khattri, Eric Kim from California, Bernd Schaeffers from Solingen and Nicholas Goodden from London.
However, in order to supplement this range with your name, you do not have to buy a camera. A smartphone and Instagram are enough, where day by day there are more and more accounts dedicated to street style. Some of them belong to photographers who shoot for the world gloss, others to fashion bloggers, and still others duplicate sites that are haunted by the glory of The Sartorialist.
