Street photography has been around almost as long as photography it self. We can find examples of this from as early as 1887 in the work of Jacob Riis and his "How the other half lives" project. Set in the tenement blocks of New York. The image below "Tramp" illustrates how his style is varied from the way most street photographers work today by seeming to be somewhat staged and the subjects mostly appear although in their natural environment, to be aware of his presence and are posing for the shot.
How-Other-Half-Lives Amazon Preview
Eugene Atget was a prominent artist in Paris around the same time 1890 until just before he died in 1927..he carried around an 18 x 24 cm. view camera that was fitted with a brass rectilinear lens and had no shutter.He produced glass plate negatives from long exposures and any moving objects would be captured with trails and blurs as they would today. Similar to Jacob then that any subjects in the images must have been aware of what he was doing in order to stay still long enough to come out in his images naturally and not be distorted.
The forty years he spent as a photographer accumulated over 5,000 negatives and 10,000 prints of street views shop windows and anything else he felt fitted into his systematic documentation of Paris.
flickr.com/Atget2
Both these images have come from the George Eastman House Flickr pages where they have displayed some of the 500 prints they have of his in their collection.
flickr.comgeorge_eastman_house/sets/Atget
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