Nagar, T. (2012).
Any camera anywhere: The new street photographer's manifesto. Lewes: Ilex.
Think of this book as
Street Photography for Dummies. It provides a suitable introduction for those with no background, or those who have just started and may be curious about some of the problems they have encountered in their practice. Anyone interested in topics of art, aesthetics, history, or philosophy should look elsewhere.
As befitting an introductory text, it has been designed for the least informed audience. Each page is a self-contained topic, with little chunks of text and lots of images. It's like a book made from a slide show. Fortunately, page design and image selection is quite good, so even if you don't get much from the text, it looks good and has quite a high quotient of interesting images. Topics covered include practical matters of practice, such as how to dress and behave when photographing strangers on the street, camera selection, subject matter, location, and composition, among others. By far the best section is the gallery of photographers that makes up the last quarter of the book.
Regarding the manifesto, it is fairly well summarized in the title: any camera, anywhere. Nagar subscribes to a democratic conception of street photography in which no special technology is required and in which all subjects are image worthy, though at one point she makes the rather exaggerated claim of street photography being a way of life. I wonder what that might entail?
Tanya Nagar is a 20-something, London-based amateur photographer. You can read an interview with her
here.
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The first few chapters were of interest, but about halfway through I grew disappointed with the Great Artists approach. Westerbeck provides little in the way of technological, psychological or sociological perspectives on the prerequisites for street photography. Having covered mostly France in the book’s preceding chapters, Westerbeck introduces "foreign" practitioners in Chapter 10, though what exactly constitutes foreign in this context is not clear. The English are included (in the person of Bill Brandt), the Mexican (in Manuel Alvarez Bravo) and the Japanese (in Kineo Kuwabata). Westerbeck notes all three produced work that could be said to mimic or be derived from that of Cartier-Bresson and wonders to what to degree they may have been consciously exploiting CB’s techniques or style. Further still, he wonders if the nature of the medium and the city coalesce in the production of a particular kind of imagery. This is precisely the kind of question that begs to be explored, but is largely ignored. 