It is possible that street photography had no soul to begin with.

Or that it made a deal with the devil around the time Instagram was birthed. Perhaps on a dark and cloudless night, Lucifer made a pact: ‘I will make you Insta famous and bathe you in an avalanche of likes and shares but in return you’ll forever make photos devoid of any soul or meaning’. 

But I don’t believe either of those things are true.

This topic has been bubbling away in street photography circles for some time now, especially since photographer Justin Mott called out street photographers in a YouTube video for producing trite and repetitive work.

Mott said the street photography masters had “emotion in their photos, they made you feel something about life” and, by contrast, modern, popular street shooters are cheap imitations, lacking in originality and heart.

“My point isn’t that the people doing this are wrong or bad photographers. I’m just saying it’s a bit soulless,” he said. “It’s getting cliche. It’s getting repetitive. It’s copy and paste photography if I’m being honest.”

So is he right?

Social media has upended many of the things we used to hold dear: human connection, self-worth, the thirst for knowledge. And there’s no doubt the disrupting influence of social media has had a flow-on effect on photography. The age of the internet has precipitated a sharp increase in the volume of images we’re exposed to and, simply due to the sheer weight of numbers, most of those photos are bound to be banal. You have to wade through oceans of tar to find the gold. 

But I think we have an oversharing problem rather than a scarcity of soul. You don’t always need to feed the beast; hold on to some of your work or be more selective with what you share with the world. The masters who came before us worked on their craft for decades and only released a carefully curated selection of their images. 

On Street Life, the podcast I co-host with my mate John St, we recently hosted a round table discussion on the subject of whether street photography has been robbed of its soul. Our guests were Sydney-based shooters Houman Katoozi, Steve Dimitriadis and Ben Greenslade-Stanton. 

If you’d like to listen to the episode you can do so here.

“This idea of ‘soul’… It’s in the eye of the viewer,” Ben said on the podcast. “I think it was Rick Rubin who said: ‘You can’t control what the audience thinks.’ Once you put work out there, you can’t tell someone what to think of your work.”

So am I guilty of producing photos without “soul”? Absolutely I am! Here are a few examples. 

I made these at a time when street photography was new to me and every pocket of light and slice of shadow caught my attention. I was learning to see and notice things and figure out my camera. And I wouldn’t change that photography rite of passage for anything.  

So Instagram may have spawned a generation of mimics and an algorithm that incentivises simplicity over substance. But I think it’s important to recognise that everyone is at a different stage of their street photography journey and be kind to those whose work you might find lacking in originally. We’re all finding our feet. We’re all still learning. If “soul” is the goal then it may just take time and hard work to get there.