A photograph made in a street, of strangers who did not know they were being photographed, has a long history of being celebrated as documentary truth. The tradition, traceable through Cartier-Bresson and the mid-century photo-essay, took the unposed subject as a kind of guarantee: the camera caught life as it was lived, not as it presented itself to be seen. The argument was implicit but powerful; the very absence of consent was offered as a proof of authenticity.
The argument has weakened over the decades. Several developments have weakened it. The most obvious is the rise of more invasive cameras, including phones, which have shifted the moral arithmetic by making the photographer harder to notice and the subject easier to surprise. Another is a broader cultural shift in how the appearance of one's body in public is understood, with consent treated less as a courtesy than as a default to which exceptions require justification. A third, less remarked, is the spread of platforms on which a single street photograph can travel widely, reaching not only an art audience that had its own conventions of looking but a much larger one with no such conventions.
The photographer's reply, in the most sympathetic version, has not been to deny these shifts but to argue that they do not bear on the practice in the same way that critics suppose. The documentary photographer, on this version, occupies a public street and records what any onlooker could have seen; the technical aid of a camera differs in degree from human seeing rather than in kind; and the spread of the image online is the responsibility of the platforms rather than the photographer. The reply has some force where the image is general — a crowd at a station, an unidentifiable back — and much less where the image is specific, recognisable, and tied to a moment its subject would not have chosen to make public.
A workable position is more demanding than either the unqualified defence or the unqualified critique. It accepts that the public street is not the private home but that what counts as a private moment is not coterminous with what counts as a private space; it accepts the photographer's interest in unposed image without elevating that interest above the subject's interest in not being made permanently available to strangers; and it asks the photographer to think harder, before pressing the shutter, about which of those interests will, in the case before him, weigh more.
The author's attitude toward documentary street photography is best described as: