no restrooms or telephones

I showed my street photography to a friend, and she said, “That’s not street.” She did street photography herself and according to her it had to be black and white. In certain corners of the photographic internet, “street” is synonymous with the aesthetic of Gary Winogrand. As I understand it, the sole requisite for street photography is candor (although one celebrated practitioner claims that a moment restaged immediately after it occurs remains candid). My work could not be more candid. It was shot from the windshield as I drove by — so candid, in fact, that even I didn’t know what the camera picked up until I got home and looked at the file. I could do this on my daily commute, at dawn and again at dusk when the light turns golden. My route passed by VCU Art in Richmond, Virginia. The school’s buildings on the north side of the street where high and the buildings on the south side of the street were low creating a canyon of reflected light. Things went well until the city installed an express-bus lane (complete with kiosk stations) down the middle of the street. The sidewalks emptied out, and that was the end of the project.