Street Photography And Documentary Photography, Is There A Difference?

As mentioned earlier on my social media pages and on my blog: going forward I will focus on street and documentary photography on my website, while fine art images are being moved to Saatchi Art.

There seems to be a bit of a debate about whether street photography is a sub-genre of documentary photography or not.

Let’s first look at some definitions:

The keyword, for me, lies in the word “chronicle” in the Documentary Photography definition that says “…to chronicle events or environments…”

Here, again, Wikipedia is a time saver by providing a good definition: A chronicle (Latin: chronica, from Greek χρονικά chroniká, from χρόνος, chrónos – "time") is a historical account of facts and events arranged in chronological order, as in a timeline.

When we talk about “…a historical account…arranged in chronological order,…” we need to have multiple images!

While I agree that Street Photography is documenting what is happening on the street, it, usually, is the lack of multiple images that record an event in chronological order that makes it differ from Documentary Photography.

Street Photography often is candid (not: snapshot!) photography: consisting of single images. Even when several Street Photography images are taken minutes apart they often don’t necessarily relate directly to each other; the only common factor being the place where the images have been taken.

The moment, however, that a story is being told with multiple images, it for me becomes Documentary Photography.

And we need to keep in mind that Documentary Photography does not need to focus on big events (e.g. war conflicts, demonstrations, political events); it also can be documenting a local event, or a period of someone’s life, or anything else that usually would not make it to the big news media.

Street Photography versus Documentary Photography: maybe a small nuance, but one that is important to me. Both genres appeal to me and I am in the process of changing my website accordingly (watch this space! 🙂)