Paris Travelogue: Street Photography

Shadowy figures rush by a waiting girl in the Forum Les Halles

Photographing people as they go about their daily business on the street is a branch of photography that has a small but passionate following. And personally, I can’t think of another city - with the possible exception of New York - that offers as much potential as Paris.

The city itself was home to some of the world’s most famous people snappers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Andre Kertesz. These guys recorded the life of the city in all its glory and degradation for much of the last century, leaving behind a catalogue of images that give a great insight into 20th-century Paris.

The Kiss
However, don’t run off with the idea that their remarkable photographs were purely the result of a great eye and brilliant timing. That might have been the case in some instances but a lot of thought also went into those cute, funny and poignant pictures of people caught in incongruous circumstances.

Robert Doisneau’s famous shot, The Kiss, is an iconic image that appears to have been grabbed at precisely the right moment. Years after it was taken, though, Doisneau admitted that it had been staged - as had some more of his pictures. I also have my doubts about a lot of Cartier-Bressons photographs as well as the positioning of people in the frame and the timing of events seem just too fortunistic for me.

That doesn’t detract in any way from these photographers as it’s quite easy to enjoy pictures for their own sake without knowing all about the background to them. If you want to emulate these masters, therefore, you’ll have to adopt some of their approaches. Nowadays, you’ll also have to bear in mind that French privacy laws have changed since their time (explanation of the laws). Don’t let that worry you unduly as I’ve been snapping people in Paris for years and have never been taken to task by anyone.

There are several guidelines (rules would be too strong a word for them) that it would be wise to stick to when you start off. Use inconspicuous, quiet equipment. Street photography can be done with any sort of camera but you’ll attract less attention to yourself if you go about your business discretely.

Stealthy!
For decades, the camera of choice was the Leica rangefinder with it’s super-sharp range of wide and standard lenses and whisper quiet shutter. Many street photographers still swear by them but today there are cameras that are even quieter and don’t cost nearly so much. I’m talking here about digicams.

To all intents and purposes, they are completely silent - you might just hear the aperture blades operating at the moment of exposure but that’s it. With their smaller sensors, they also have greater depth of field which makes it easier to get the subject in focus than with the more limited depth of field of the 35mm camera.

The only thing that stops them being perfect is a bit of shutter lag - the brief moment it takes for the picture to be captured after you’ve pressed the button. Most street scenes have to be captured at just the right moment and this delay can cause havoc. Part of the reason for this is the need for the camera to complete its autofocus sequence. You can speed things up a bit by setting the camera to manual focus and picking a distance setting and aperture that enable you to get everything sharp (depth of field scale for sensors/35mm).

A mobile phone users appears to incur the wrath
of an elderly man as he passes a portrait exhibition in Rue St Jacques

Remote control
I sometimes use a Minolta A2 digicam around my neck with the remote cord attached and fed through a slit in the lining of a jacket down into the sleeve. With the lens set at the equivalent of 28mm and manually focused on two metres, I can take pictures on the metro or in street markets without anyone knowing what’s going on. But I’ve successfully used 35mm single lens reflex cameras, their digital equivalent, digicams and even old Rolleiflex twin lens reflex cameras (as used by Doisneau himself for a time) so don’t over-analyse things.

Forward Planning
Plan your photographs - don’t just go out on spec hoping to capture something. Street photography often involves people doing things against a photogenic backdrop. The background can be something beautiful, such as the Eiffel Tower, or a gritty, graffiti-covered Metro station. In many cases, though, replace the background with something non-descript and you’d be as well not taking the photograph in the first place. So think a bit about the type of photograph you’d like to take.

Pick a great background, get into position with your camera set appropriately and wait. And wait some more. Eventually, an interesting character will happen along who makes the whole thing click. Maybe it will be the interaction of two or three individuals against your chosen background that makes the picture. Please don’t think you can just wander the streets of Paris and produce pictures like Cartier-Bresson. You may get lucky but, more often than not, you’ll just waste a lot of time.

Consider carefully your choice of lens. I think the most effective street photography is done with a wide angle. Getting in close to the subjects puts you right in the thick of things and produces more striking pictures. However, that takes a certain thick-skinned personality. If you’re not so out-going and since you’re shooting in Paris, bearing in mind the privacy laws, it would be better to choose a standard lens or slight telephoto.

Being the shy and retiring type, I like to use a 50mm lens on my Pentax K10D which is the equivalent of about 75mm in 35mm terms. In some locations, such as the Louvre which is usually thronged with people at just about any time of year, you can use longer lenses still, photographing people against the fountains or the glass walls of the Pyramide du Louvre entrance.

Colour or black and white?
If you’re using a digital camera, you have the capability of shooting both. See here for tips on converting colour images into black and white. If you’re loaded up with film, then it’s got to be black and white for me. All the best street photographs have been taken in monochrome. Black and white has the ability to distill the elements of a scene down to its bare essentials.