Dear Colleagues,

Street photography is ubiquitous. Now, so it seems, it is everywhere, and everyone is a photographer on the streets. Anodyne and exceptional public actions are continuously being caught, framed, and circulated in books and magazines as well as on small and large screens. This special issue seeks to address the social conditions shaping street photography, past and present. How should we think the street and photography together? How has one space of representation come to define the other? More broadly, I invite submissions addressing three related aspects of the genre’s formation—its formation as a genre—and its contemporary mutations. The first is the social spaces framing the organization of photography in the street since the medium’s invention in the 1830s. Can we consider the act of making photographs in the street without also studying those being made in the studio and/or the home? How, in other words, has the public space of the street been produced—been framed—in relation to calls for privacy and the logic of privatization? Is street photography always caught up in acts of covert or overt surveillance? Second, I am interested in submissions drawing out the myriad ways in which street photography quite literally "frames" the organization of publics—from those filling the streets in protest to those being pushed out of the streets by the police. Likewise, how has the institutionalization of street photography as art photography occluded those publics from representation? Finally, this Special Issue calls on scholars interested in addressing the importance of the ways in which something called "street photography" was defined and developed in relationship to the explosion of mass media in the 20th century and the mobilization of images on a number of  related screens, from television and film to video and computer. Street photography may be ubiquitous but its practice, it seems fair to argue, is not merely or simply "photographic".

Dr. Stephanie Schwartz
Guest Editor

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• photography
• streets
• protest
• privacy
• social media
• documentary
• urban space
• surveillance