V E B A H O O D

Montreal, 2008 © Velibor Božović

Simply, I miss street photography. You don’t need to read further then that first sentence.

For quite some time now, street photography has been excluded from the commercial galleries and all other established ways of art dissemination. On rare occasion, we get the opportunity to see some in museums but only from the masters of 4, 5, 6 decades ago (though I can’t remember the last time we even had that opportunity here in Montreal). In art schools, it seems, an attempt  to do a street photography project would make you fail the class, though I can’t confirm that with certainty since the last time a student dared to try was some 15 years ago.

The art and publishing world are interested only in photographs of preconceived ideas. Which is fine, screw them. But, could it be that in this age, with everyone being a photographer and with Google street view and security cameras everywhere and cameras in the sky, the life in our cities will remain undocumented? Perhaps not, there are many fine street photographers doing what they like to do, but I would be interested to know when is the last time a museum acquired a body of work from a contemporary street photographer.

Some future researchers interested in the subject, 30, 50, 100 years from now, will look in vain into a museum’s archives. There, they will find no photographs that show the life on our streets in a few decades at the beginning of 21st Century. But than, 50 years from now, there might be no museums either.