Saturday, November 30, 2013, 1:30 – 3:00pm
Surrey City Centre Library, Room 401

A voyeur lurks in each of us, noticing, seeing, analyzing, and sometimes capturing the thousands of small dramas, both tragic and comic, that are played out every second on city streets across the globe. We will look with curiosity behind the lenses of street photographers to understand why – and how – they capture the minute dramas of daily existence.
Every photographer chooses (or not) to reveal himself or herself to a passerby and to interfere with the fluidity of a spontaneous moment. Each such decision entails legal, social, and ethical questions. Who makes the rules? Where do you draw the line? Such questions always stir heated discussions not only among professionals but also among the public who, after all, stand in front of the lenses.

Do we understand pictures we see? Is there more than one meaning of every photograph? This presentation will be a colourful journey into the implications, contexts, motives, and variations of street photography. We will explore the work of various photographers and learn how to interpret and understand street photography images from the perspective of a practicing photographer.

Humanist photography, the more gentle and poetic sister of photojournalism, often called Poetic realism is the focus of this course. We will explore the history of the genre from its beginnings within the social and political context of each time period up until the present times.

Together with flâneurs of the past, we will stroll the Paris streets of 1900’s Belle Époque and through the lenses of photographers – unknown and known – we will witness the golden age of the genre in the mid of the 20th century with Henri Cartier Bresson, Izis, Édouard Boubat and Willy Ronis to continue to explore the world with works of our contemporaries such as Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark and Michael Williamson.

Wednesdays May 16 – June 20, 2012 6:00 – 7:50pm SFU Downtown campus Harbour Centre room 1505

As soon as photographers took their cumbersome cameras onto the streets, a new genre was born. Almost as old as photography itself is the fascination to immortalize the life on the stage of city streets. This course offers an in-depth study of the history of the street photography genre, and will take you on a long journey through various times and places to explore the genre’s beginnings through the end of its golden era in the 1980s. Lectures will be supplemented by drawing upon a large range of visual materials.