By Bil Brown
If as the MFA Photo students say, there is a visual language to photography. I have been saying for the last few years, “If there is a visual language, then there must be poets!”
I was a writer before I was a photographer, a poet, well… a poetry student that never really went “pro” because I wasn’t built for the stuffy halls of academia, tenure and the like. I’m a little too street. However, at that time words were my medium of choice—words that could invent worlds, abstract meaning, dissolve time and space. At Naropa’s Kerouac School, studying under Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Kathy Acker, Hakim Bey, and others I learned that writing was insurgent, restless, able to destroy and rebuild meaning. But writing is also severed from the necessity of presence. As former MAGNUM Photos President Charles Harbutt once observed, a writer can describe winter in Japan from a sweltering New York apartment. The page permits this displacement; it owes nothing to the immediacy of reality.
Photography, however, demands presence. Photography is like that. You can’t get away. You cannot photograph a winter street in Tokyo from a summer room in Brooklyn. You have to be there—the camera has to be there—at the moment light bounces off the world into the lens. This, for me, was revelatory when I realized it. It meant that the camera did what the pen could not: tether me irrevocably to the real. A cure for the depression of “thinking it through” as a poet. I could engage reality as it was happening, in an instant. I could remember or forget it as I saw fit, but I had some real document of my presence in that time-space. Writing was imagination’s laboratory. Photography was the real colliding with perception in an instant of undeniable evidence.
It was Allen Ginsberg that introduced me to his friend Robert Frank in 1994. I sat in Frank’s studio speaking to his schizophrenic son, during a time when I was avidly reading R.D.Laing and thinking about The Asylum –– a documentary we had went over in a class I was teaching assistant for at Naropa. Laing’s thesis was that if schizophrenics were pulled outside of the social dynamic they could be cured. He proved it! That is until they went back in. I could be outside and inside, seeing or photographing and then writing. This was like my Naropa teacher Bernadette Mayer’s photo-word art intersection, Memory. She photographed a roll a day for a month in the early 70s, wrote before it after shooting remembering what she shot and then after wrote what the drugstore prints showed her. When the exhibit went up in 1972, it predated Eggleston’s Guide by a few years, and was color shot by a rangefinder. Bernadette had the words she wrote read on loop for 6 hours with the photographs up. Ideas and photographs have a place together, poetry and photography are totally intertwined.
When I moved from writing to photographing, I carried language with me. My images are still constructed as sentences, fragments, ruptures of syntax. But what I learned from Harbutt is that photographs are not written—they happen. As he said: “I don’t take pictures; pictures take me.” This inversion strikes me because it acknowledges what I feel: the camera is not a passive instrument but an active collaborator, a medium that seizes as much as it yields.
To write is to build. To photograph is to surrender, to be taken. Like a writer learning to have clarity with their words, a photographer becomes more and more clear as they learn the simple syntax of technology, emotion, eye, hand, and especially heart.
Collision with Reality
Harbutt makes clear that photography’s uniqueness lies in its compulsory relationship to the external world. Unlike painting or writing, which can invent from imagination, photography requires something outside itself: light, object, presence. This is what he calls the continuum—the collision of photographer, world, and camera in a specific fraction of time. That continuum is what fascinated me as a writer. In prose, I could summon the dream. In photographs, I had to confront the real.
I will say I have been shocked and pushed again, not by an American photographer but by the Japanese post-war moment of PROVOKE. First Daido Moriyama of course, he’s still around and very active–but when I learned of Takuma Nakahira’s For A Language To Come it brought me in.
Nakahira’s radical insistence on dismantling perception intersects with Harbutt’s existential continuum. Both refuse the comfort of the artificial sense of the image. Both declare that photography’s power lies in its uncontrollable dependence on the world as it is. The photograph is not a dream but a confrontation. It is an image that, as Harbutt writes, is “caused by reality” and therefore carries the chisel-mark of existence itself.
In my practice, this means entering the street not as a playwright staging a scene but as an interlocutor waiting for language to be spoken by the world. A glance, a collapse, a gesture becomes the sentence; the shutter punctuates. Unlike writing, I cannot reorder time; I can only intercept it. The street is not a metaphor. It is an unfolding text, one that I can only enter mid-sentence.
I’ve recently become aware in dialectic with the photography spaces online that many times photographers police-themselves and others for ethics. Ethics are important, but maybe we should be clear here: we are taking a photo that is either shared or not shared. If it is shared it is of a person, place or thing. The agency of that person place or thing has already been compromised. Ethics in art isn’t about playing safe or avoiding discomfort—it’s about intention and accountability. Bruce Gilden doesn’t exploit misery, personally he’s been there, his history is well documented and I don’t need to recant it here; what Bruce does is confront us with what we’d rather not see. That confrontation is ethical because it forces recognition instead of erasure. In his Face photos in particular they are consensual, in some cases maybe the last photos of the people in question — made into icons, or illustrative mosaics. The work lays directly in the art world like few other photographers.
The history of art has always been bound to suffering—Goya, or say in photography Arbus, Goldin, D’Agata even the Ancient Greeks knew that beauty and horror live side by side. Ethics in art isn’t about denying that reality; it’s about how we frame it. To me Gilden doesn’t exploit misery, he forces us to face it. If you want to say it’s his ego, well he isn’t a photojournalist feigning objectivity. It’s subjective.
Susan Sontag said, ‘Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one.’
“There’s no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth. This is the poetry of life’s reality” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
Let’s get this out of the way. Even if someone is impaired, their image can still carry dignity, truth, or resistance. Many people living on the street want to be seen, remembered, or acknowledged. This I know, I’ve been there. The camera can give them presence in a world that often erases them.
As Gordon Parks said: “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America.” Consent is compromised precisely because of systemic oppression—and photography is one way to fight that oppression. W Eugene Smiths MINIMATA is a perfect example, as is Antonie D’Agata’s entire body of work. I agree with D’Agata that if we have a subject of our photos that is disturbed the subject’s agency is already fractured—by drugs, by society, by exclusion. The camera doesn’t “steal” it; it mirrors it. It’s a form of solidarity, or can be according to context. The person already lives without agency, they have been out there by circumstances. The context is apparent. As is the reason you are doing it. Your subjective view, your personal history, your approach is documented in every image you take. We can see the angles, the lighting, whether or not you confront or command. We can see it all in the photo.
The ethical core is not: “Did they agree?” but “Did I expose the violence of their condition honestly, and often with myself implicated?” Your authorship is the very thing you are photographing. Every shutter pull is a signature.
So yes, if you feel it, snap that unhoused person, that drug addict, that nightlife drunk. If you feel otherwise, we will not see eye to eye, not because your ideology around aesthetics and photography differ from mine – but because I will have a hard time trusting you. If we are on the streets, and you are my photo buddy, I could be in a bad situation and you would choose to think of someone’s “agency” while we are being jacked. This is reality. The streets are hard. If someone is really on them, they know. If you hesitate, often you put yourself at risk. Just stay away if this is how you feel. I mean that. Don’t go down that alley or on San Pedro in LA if you are not ready for it. You will end up in the hospital. This isn’t hyperbole. This is the way it is.
I get the other side as well, you want to protect people’s agency and dignity. The recently passed Sebastiao Salgado famously said, “It is not the photographer that is taking the picture but the person being photographed.” Yet his work was condemned for making it too aesthetically beautiful. I think you must think of dignity in image making but also, not walking away from a feeling that you need to take a photo. Those are the photos that we must take. These are irreconcilable truths. If the people who believe the people do not have agency because of drug use or intoxication, and therefore should not be photographed are right, then the image cannot exist. If I am right then you cannot practice safe distance, controlled output and ethical distance and get anything like a good photo.
I agree to disagree, and not negate either practice. As we say, you do you.
Street is A Rupture
“There’s a part of cowardice in the usual position of documentary photography in between voyeurism and safety. This is where exploitation lies.” Antonie D’Agata
Takuma Nakahira argued that photography must revive language by dislocating it-by producing images that unsettle the familiar bits, making us stumble over what we thought we knew. Harbutt described photography as that moment before interpretation, before design-when perception collides with the outside world. For me, the bridge between these two insights is the street.
The street, in its flux, is pure visual syntax: fragmented, nonlinear, resistant to closure. A child runs across the frame like a sudden comma. A drunk falls into shadow like a broken line. A unsightly tall man wears a blonde wig and bathrobe walking with a book that references LA’s pink Vette street queen. The photograph is not a complete sentence but a cut, a rupture in language that forces the reader-viewer-to fill in the gap. In this way, the street photograph is both image and writing, but a writing of interruption, not narration. It never really was storytelling, unless you see an entire catalog like W Eugene Smith’s multi-volume 10,000 or so photos you can never know the whole thing, the photographer of course only tells you a moment. This isn’t cinema.
As a writer-turned-photographer, I understand my images as grammarless stanzas of the present tense. They are documents, yes, but they are also provocations. They remind us that the real cannot be contained neatly, that language always stutters when confronted with existence. Harbutt’s notion of being “taken by the picture” is precisely this: the surrender of authorial control, the acceptance that reality writes itself through us, not the other way around.
Post-Street and the New Continuum
But here lies the rupture of our own era: the street itself, as stage and commons, is vanishing. Where Harbutt could walk through New York in the 1970s and let pictures seize him, today’s photographer encounters privatized zones, algorithmic mediation, and infrastructures of surveillance. The continuum Harbutt described-photographer, world, camera-is increasingly interfered with by corporate and state apparatuses.
This is what I call POST-STREET. The decisive moment (although that is really just Cartier-Bresson’s interpretation of Poet-founder of Surrealism’s Objective Chance) is now infiltrated by invisible others: data capture, surveillance feeds, corporate architectures of control, and even masked agents with iPhone apps that tell them what’s in your bank account. When I raise my camera, I am no longer the only one looking. Every face I photograph has already been scanned, tagged, categorized by unseen lenses-or will soon be. Soon as I post it to social media it becomes part of the database of “I was there”, or even “YOU were there.” The street, once a democratic commons, has been fragmented into regulated flows.
And yet, Harbutt’s existential lesson still holds: the photograph remains tethered to reality. Even in POST-STREET, the act of photographing insists on presence, on being alive in a world that wants to disappear us into data. To be “taken by a picture” in this context is to resist the flattening of life into metrics. It is to recover the shock of existence amid infrastructures of invisibility. This is why D’Agata, who is vehemently against the relationship of documentary photography and thinks it is complicit, might be correct.
I think our work should embody this transition. Not about capturing the street as a physical space but immersing ourselves in the raw, visceral experiences of life-often in the margins of society. I think our images are a means to“contaminate” traditional photography, to “pervert” or “subvert” and undermine pre-formatted assumptions surrounding and supporting the insidious ideology of a culture made out of the sometimes most banal of conventions. I like the deeply personal and experiential approach; I mostly work alone, focusing on the physical experience of the moment rather than on technical or aesthetic control. This method allows me to delve into the intimate and often uncomfortable aspects of human existence, I haven’t thought about it specifically but since I am now I want the viewer to confront the realities I present. It’s like photographing is a “matter of physical survival,” enabling communication and the exchange of ideas. One photo that leads to another can be a sort of instant manifesto, that negates the last, ad infinitum.
Charles Harbutt’s statement holds rigorous threat in today’s post-truth world, “Photography is not art; it is something totally new in human experience… And art critics and philosophers have reacted like the Pope to Galileo. Since the fact doesn’t fit the theory, jettison the fact.”
Writing with Light
I want you to consider a new blueprint for street-photography. The photographer no longer merely walks the avenues, the crosswalk at Shibuya, Winnograd’s 5th Avenue or waits for the decisive moment in public squares—they enter worlds that exist in-between, where control, exposure, and intimacy are mutable. I want to see work shows that street photography can survive not by nostalgically chasing open-air streets but by tracing the human condition in the spaces we rarely acknowledge: the hidden, the intimate, the precarious, and the transient. The street is gone—but photography, when willing to navigate both public and private thresholds, persists.
I want us to use the history, techniques (a lot of them) and skills in both film and digital capture to go further. The photo-books and zines we create should be something more, the pop-up galleries and street activations should be abrupt. Every Instagram account should be shadow banned or lost and we keep making more so people follow you around the app to see what you are doing or continue to do. We should cause a stir, controversy, our photos should not be polite. And there should be a a lot of them, constantly like some Situationalist graffiti in wheat paste posters everywhere all the time.
If writing taught me to construct meaning, photography taught me to confront it. Harbutt’s belief—that photographs seize us more than we seize them—remains central to my practice. As a writer, I controlled the sentence; as a photographer, I surrender to the collision between lens and world. Nakahira demanded that we dismantle complacent ways of seeing; Harbutt reminded us that photographs are the residue of encounters with the real. Both insights converge in the street, where images erupt, rupture, and demand witness.
So when I photograph now, I do so not as simply a decorator of instantaneous moments (although somehow I have developed “a style”–maybe this is for a future essay) but as a writer of interruptions, a recorder of ruptures. I’m down with Alan Schaller or Matt Stuart, even Phil Pennman doing what they do although in many cases it seems more like graphic design or Pictorialism infused street looking scenes than pure photography. I am not interested in polishing the street into nostalgia, nor in submitting to its erasure under this surveillance cult that engulfs us worldwide. I am interested in the continuum Harbutt named – the point at which self, camera, and world collide to produce an image that is both document and a direct question.
Street photography is not artifice. It is not nostalgia. It is not safe, let me reiterate that. Street photography in a POST-STREET world is not safe at all – – take of that what you will. Street photography is the language of interruption, or a typographical map of a stressed-out face, a testimony of your presence in the space-time continuity. It is writing with light, but writing that resists grammar, that accepts rupture as truth, and often people will dispute that truth and call what you do un-ethical, dastardly, evil, perverted––ah yes, perverted. to turn completely, to overturn the expected path. You may have to reinvent yourself many times. Not just one style not just one thing but many to get at what is happening.
Street photography once assumed streets as stages, strangers as props, and chance as its law—but that street is gone now, or just barely around. POST-STREET demands we pervert the form itself: reject neutral observation, blur public and private, embed in margins, confront intimacy and danger. As Harbutt said, I don’t take pictures. Pictures take me. And that, in the end, is the only honest manifesto for photography that remains.
Additional note from the editors of Street-Photography.Net
Please join the discussion below. We are looking forward to hearing what you all think of Bill Brown’s first Article for Street-Photography.Net. I found Bil Brown via a series of comments to an article on F-Stoppers and reached out to ask him, if you he would like to write an article for us here.
I believe that he makes a great case for a Post-Street World for street photography, One that is authentic and possibly confrontational, one that is also not afraid to show the world as it is not as we want it to be. It would be great to have a discussion on this topic. So let’s start by using the comments below.
A little more on Bil Brown.
To check out more of Big Browns photography and a video with him talking and walking with Dave Herring, follow these links.
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