There's a particular kind of loss that comes with growing up: the moment you realize the world isn't what you once thought it was. For most of us, innocence only moves in one direction, we lose it as we grow older. But photography provided something unexpected, it gave some of it back. Photography for me was sort of like beginning a new life entirely. I rediscovered a way of moving through the world with the same openness I had lost somewhere along the way. Because I didn’t know street photography was even a genre, I approached the streets with a renewed sense of curiosity. I wasn't looking for an audience, a niche, a formula, or permission to call myself anything. Before I knew people called themselves street photographers, I was already doing it. I experienced absolute freedom in having no frame of reference. Every photograph was a discovery. Not knowing about the world I was walking into actually protected me creatively. In that regard, I was very lucky with photography. Sometimes ignorance is the beginning of originality because no one has told you what you're supposed to imitate yet.
The first time I set out with a camera, I wasn’t thinking about views on social media. But instead I was focused on understanding what it was I was drawn to. What I wanted to see. I relied only on following my intuition. In 2023, after a few years of this approach, I decided it was time to create an account dedicated to sharing the work I’d been focused on making. Social media didn’t create my practice. It amplified it. And with that amplification came exposure to a world I had previously really known nothing about. One of the earlier things to happen there was people comparing my work to photographers I had never heard of. Some even accused me of copying styles I hadn't known of. My growth on social media came with a cost: the loss of innocence.
Walking the streets used to be about discovery for me, not about reproducing. Up until that point, my frame of reference had been films, one of my main backgrounds. Experiencing accusations online taught me very quickly how easily an audience can give a frame of reference to your work after the fact. Once the work is out in the world, how you arrived there is often of little to no consequence to the people looking at it. Removed from the process, comparison becomes one of the only ways the audience can understand what they're looking at. This made me double down on my commitment to my way of seeing as I navigated the new waters I was in. I didn’t like the fact that my work was being constrained as the audience attempted to catalogue it and place it neatly in a filing cabinet.
In parallel to the above, a new trend began. My approach to sharing photography on social media was being reproduced. I watched something that had emerged naturally from my way of seeing become interpreted by others as a repeatable formula. As my work became more successful, the accusations that I was copying others began to fade. Instead, others were attempting to reverse-engineer what I was doing. However, while you can copy someone's way of framing a video, you can't copy the years of walking, dedication, and instinct that produced it. Originality is difficult to come by and intentionality is impossible to verify. Only the person making the work knows why they made it.
As time went on, the problem wasn’t that other people were reproducing the way I shared my work. The problem was that I was gradually changing. I wasn’t going to be making the same kind of content forever, either. In addition, the space began to suffer from saturation, forcing me to confront my own repetition. Whatever the cause, the same visual language that once felt alive to me began to feel exhausted and unoriginal. Maybe I had simply outgrown it. Sometimes we choose to leave something behind not because it was wrong, but because it was right for the person we were then. There’s a big difference in creating for yourself and sharing it, than creating with the sole intention of producing content.
Now that we’re on the topic of content itself, that brings me to a trend I’ve noticed that I refer to as performative street photography, where a creator uses photography as a vehicle to farm reactions and engagement from interactions with strangers on the street. It’s of little difference to me whether these interactions are genuine or staged. My concern is with what’s becoming the primary work presented to the audience. Is the work the photograph? Or is the work the interaction surrounding the photograph? In much, if not all, of this content, the photograph has been reduced to a mere prop in a much larger performance. The script is ready: The scene is set on a busy street. The creator photographs an unsuspecting stranger. Action: the creator approaches, camera rolling. The interaction is forced; the reveal is filmed. End of scene. The person’s reaction is the payoff, the reaction generates comments, the comments generate engagement, and the engagement rewards the format. And gradually, the photograph becomes the excuse for the performance rather than the reason for making it.
The way I’ve always approached street photography is by directing my attention outward. I disappear into observation. I’m looking for gestures, light, coincidences, beauty, or just the accidental arrangement of life. But what happens to the craft when the photograph becomes secondary? With performative content, the center of gravity shifts. The photographer becomes the main character; we’re in a personality contest, all of a sudden. The stranger becomes the supporting cast and the camera becomes a social device. The photograph is only evidence of the interaction taking place and the street becomes a stage. They are not street photographers. They are street performers. An outgoing person can approach strangers and be charismatic on camera. That’s a skill. However, it isn’t automatically photographic skill. Social media can confuse the two because the algorithm has little way of measuring depth of observation, while personality and emotional reaction are immediately visible and easy to engage with.
I want to take it back to the person beginning their journey in street photography today. Someone about to lose their innocence. Imagine someone, of any age, feels the impulse to photograph the street. They open social media to learn more about street photography and they’re immediately shown: confrontations, strangers reacting, dramatic reveals, engagement bait, personality-driven videos. Seeing this type of content, and all the engagement it receives, could very well influence their path away from the true craft that street photography is. And that’s what worries me. Not merely that this kind of content exists, but that the first frame of reference a new photographer receives may already be an algorithmically distorted version of the craft. I was lucky enough to begin without knowing what I was supposed to do. People need to give themselves enough solitude to discover what they see before asking the internet what it wants to see.
I was fortunate to find street photography before the audience found me. I didn’t know what the genre was supposed to be, so I had no choice but to discover what it was for me. I wasn’t trying to go viral and I wasn’t building a personality. I definitely wasn’t approaching strangers because I thought their reactions might perform well online. I was walking, looking, and responding to what life placed in front of me. That’s something I hope someone beginning today can protect: the part of the process that belongs only to you. Take photographs for yourself first. Learn what draws your attention. Build a way of seeing that has somewhere deeper to pull from than what an audience might engage with on social media.
Trends end. Algorithms change. Attention moves on. But if you spend enough time learning why you make the work in the first place, you’ll still have something to stand on when nobody is watching.