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Chasing Umbrellas at the Bottom of the World
Where street photography ends & landscape photography begins
Can street photography be done outside of town?
Or, to put it another way, if you took spontaneous photos outside of an urban environment, could they be considered street photography, or should they be regarded as something else entirely?
I guess it doesn’t really matter; photography genres are just categories at the end of the day, and there’s no harm in testing their boundaries.
But I still think it’s an interesting question, given that photos taken in nature are rarely seen as belonging to the street photography genre. Even if such photos satisfy all the other typical elements of street photography — including a sense of candidness and unplanned spontaneity — the presence of trees and grass instantly separate them from photos taken in more overtly city-like places.
There’s also no getting away from the fact that the experience of taking such photos is really no different from taking photos in a concrete jungle. You recognise the same sense of opportunity to shoot a moment you have no control over, and you experience the same sense of satisfaction and/or frustration upon shooting it.
