Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Meghan Downes, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Monash University, Australia

ABSTRACT

Street photography, or the candid visual documentation of everyday scenes, objects, and people in urban environments, is almost as old as the medium of photography itself. Some of the earliest direct positive photographic images were of city streets and the people who moved through them. But it was the development of the portable 35mm camera in 1913 that led to an explosion in the popularity of street photography over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. Committed social documentarians like Brassäi, Doisneau, and Cartier-Bresson combed the streets of Paris in search of happy accidents and unexpected convergences, and through capturing such moments, these photographers helped create the romantic mystique of “the streets” that continues to inform urban planning, architecture, fashion, music, and hundreds of advertising campaigns. Street photography was developed in tandem with the modern, industrialized city, and it became one of the primary conceptual tools through the city was imagined, created, and experienced.

A similar explosion in the popularity of street photography is happening today. Equipped with mirrorless cameras, smart phones, and social media apps—including Instagram, Flickr, and Tumblr— a new generation of amateur (and professional) photographers is taking up street photography in cities around the world. As of October 2018, more than 48.9 million photos were hashtagged as “#streetphotography” on Instagram. Tens of thousands of new street photos are posted there every day. “Instameets” and “photo walks” where photographers gather together to shoot images on the streets, have become regular events in cities as far apart as Philadelphia, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires. Street photography, in other words, is undergoing a major renaissance, facilitated and mediated by new digital technologies.

This talk surveys the state of street photography today, with a special emphasis on three Southeast Asian cities (Jakarta, Bangkok, and Singapore), which have become centers of the expanding international genre in recent years. Through looking at the work of a variety of contemporary street photographers active on Instagram, we will discuss the changing aesthetics of street photography and what they might tell us about how we look at and imagine the cities we live in. Street photography, it will be demonstrated, is not a passive medium representing the reality of urban life, but a dynamic visual practice through which urban reality is created, enacted, and reinforced. Street photographers on Instagram are emerging as some of the Twenty-First Century’s most influential urban visionaries.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Brent Luvaas is Associate Professor of Global Studies and Modern Languages at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. A cultural and visual anthropologist, and avid street photographer himself, he is interested in how new media technologies shape cultural production and urban aesthetics in the United States and Indonesia. He has published extensively on urban fashion, popular music, and digital photography and is author of the books Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging and DIY Style: Fashion, Music and Global Digital Cultures.

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