Street Photography Essay

Photographs of the street are as photography itself is old. Cameras were set on balconies or aimed them out of windows by the earliest practitioners, which took advantage of natural light in capturing the life in the streets below (Paul McDonough, 2010). As camera became more portable and smaller, the photographers took them into the streets and created a photography type. Casually spontaneous or carefully staged by turns, in nature documentary or seemingly without subject as diverse as the streets themselves. In this sense, the term ‘street photography,’ that being used now in the description of photographs taken in any space that is public, is as much as broad as the landscape categories or portrait photography.

Portsmouth, NH is the place where Paul McDonough was born. He moved to Boston, after graduating from high school in 1958 where it was after his graduation from the New England School of Art. He moved to New York City in 1967, where for the past forty years he has lived there. In the course of all that time he worked as a free-lance photographer, photography teacher and paste-up mechanical artist at Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, the Guggenheim Foundation, Yale University, Parsons School of Design, Fordham University, and Marymount College. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Foundation of Guggenheim. Among his work is in a number of private and public collections which includes, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the Joseph Seagram’s Collection, the Lila Acheson Wallace Print Collection, the DeCordova Museum, and the Dreyfus Corporation (Paul McDonough, 2010). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two children.

Off-kilter incongruities on the New Yor...

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...ches and subways, the kind of photographs I took then related to my art school days. In the summer of 1964, after roaming around Vermont, my decision move to Cambridge, MA where made me took a job that was full-time in an art studio which was commercial. Already at this time I was married to my first wife and our plan was to save enough to live for Europe in a year. Instead, arriving by U-Haul in the summer of 1967 we wound up in New York.

Manhattan, was a walker’s city now as well as forty years ago. With detours into Central Park where Mayor Lindsay had just recently opened up the grassy areas that drew great crowds, I could wear out a good deal of shoe leather crisscrossing the streets of midtown. The level of energy of those living in New York was rushing to and from their myriad destinations which was galvanizing. The main attraction was the minor