In Public
The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.
~ Robert Doisneau
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
~ Garry Winogrand
Photography is a love affair with life.
~ Burk Uzzle
A Survey
When I put this gallery together in July of 2026, there were 781 black & white photographs on this site. This page is not intended to be a “best of,” though most of my favorite images are here. This is a survey, a cross-section, of fourteen years making candid “street” pictures of people in public places.
Not Fake, Not Doc
None of the photographs shown here were staged, but this is not documentary work. As Gary Winogrand said, when you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts. The pictures tell you nothing reliable about the individuals in them; a person may appear angry or sad, but was laughing the instant before the shutter opened, and smiling the instant after the shutter closed.
I know the name and story of only one person in one photograph, my wife; she did not know that I was taking her picture as she listened to a friend. The only person that I spoke to before taking their picture is the cook having a cigarette break in Paris, 2012.
See the note at the bottom of the page for more information about the one photograph on this page where AI focus correction was applied. The use of AI is clearly marked in its caption.
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Use of AI image correction
To my mind, a true "street photograph" is one that captures a moment in time as the photographer saw it, without the addition or removal of any part. I will crop images to improve composition, but I will not change the content within the crop. I will correct exposure and color balance, I will convert to black and white, but I will not remove a fire hydrant or add a reflection, etc. However, there is one image on this web site and on this page where I allowed myself to use an AI tool to correct the focus of a photograph, i.e., the one of the woman in white polo neck sweater standing in a dark doorway:
This photograph was perhaps my favorite image from 2023, but I am conflicted about my use of AI to correct my bad focus. I failed to capture the moment as I saw it, and I fear that using AI to correct it is a step too far. I love the image and want to show it, but I have to be honest and flag that AI was used.
See the blog post, "Successful Street Photo or AI cheat?" on Medium for a longer discussion of this image, the use of AI to render it, and how I probably won't use it again.