Discover Your Purpose in Street Photography

Credit: Craig Boehman

Knowing your purpose in street photography is one thing; packaging it and presenting it to the world is quite another. I guess I’ve known all along what my purpose has been in street photography and photography in general: I turn people into art. It may sound generic. It may sound too vague. After all, isn’t that what portrait painters do? Or any number of other artists, for that matter?

Maybe. But ask any one of them what their purpose is. I bet there would be few matches to my own stated goal.

My Backstory

My presentation, and my gift-wrapping of this idea, have changed several times throughout my career. Somewhat in the middle of my street photography history, I discovered that I loved making painterly images of street scenes and people. I got fixated on the wrong thing: process specifics. In other words, I wasn’t quite hitting the mark. Back then, my stated purpose might have been: I make painterly images of people through my street photography.

Not as catchy, sure. Not as succinct. I think we should be able to narrow our purpose in street photography down to a short, simple sentence.

I also muddled the situation early on by conflating aesthetics with a school of artistic thought. For example, I love abstract expressionism and impressionism. Egon Schiele comes to mind from the world of painting. When I look at his paintings, especially his self-portraits, I feel something. That’s expressionism in a nutshell. So I thought that I should be taking more shots of people that represent an internal struggle or something that grabs hold of the viewer, something primal, universal. My stated purpose could have been: I make expressionist street photography images.

But I wouldn’t be doing the purpose-stating justice nor the range of my body of work. I knew that I loved making “artistic” images but for some reason, I hadn’t connected the dots. Not until I started printing my work. And that changed everything. Now, I’m quite literally making art out of people through my limited-edition prints. Then it clicked.

I turn people into art.

That’s what I do. The net is wide enough to capture everything I do that’s important to me in my street photography. It’s accurate. It’s simple. It’s succinct. And it’s me. It’s my tagline.

What Is Your Purpose in Street Photography?

Do you know what taglines are? In movie lingo, they’re one-liners or very short descriptions that capture the essence of a movie. They’re often used in promotional materials like movie posters and billboards. They are also useful in communicating the essence of the movie before they’re greenlighted for production.

A few examples:

Catch Me if You Can: "The true story of a real fake."

Office Space: “Work sucks.”

The Truman Show: “On the air and unaware.”

I believe street photographers can take a cue from the movie biz. Once you discover what your purpose is, package it for consumption. Make it fit. And make it sharp – like an assassin’s dagger.

The reason I talked about my own background in discovering my purpose is because it may take time, maybe years, to discover your purpose in street photography. You may have a partial picture of it. You may know what kind of pictures that you like to take but maybe you don’t know the reasons why.

Therein lies the work.

Why do you like taking pictures of people and things on the streets? You can start there. But the reasons that you come up with may not ring entirely accurate for everything that you do. Or you may just be confused by it all. That’s okay. I’m not suggesting that you should know your purpose in street photography just because some guy online suggested you should know it in the here and now. Think about it. Muddle it over. Shoot more. And if you still don’t know the answer, forget about it and keep doing what you love to do. Somewhere along the way, if you’re persistent and if you’re a true street photographyophile, you’ll figure it out.

If it helps, use my analogy of a tagline to help once you think you’re hot on the trail of your purpose. Develop it. Run it by trusted friends and see how it sounds to them. It’s okay if you don’t nail it down right away. Piggyback on the wrong stated purpose until the right one comes along. That was how my process worked out. And even now, I can’t say that this will always be my stated purpose. We all change. Life throws us surprises. Our only job is to pay attention to the undercurrents and to keep checking in with our purpose from time to time to see how it’s doing.

As for now, my purpose in street photography adorns my walls and those of my buyers and collectors. If someone asks me what I do, I can explain it all in detail. But I always have my tagline ready. It’s on my website and social media. It’s on the tip of my tongue. And if I utter it to someone, they’ll get it even if they don’t understand the process yet. That’s the beauty of a tagline – they get the conversation started and headed in the right direction.

“I turn people into art.”

What do you do?