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a Street Photography definition* G. Mark Smith |
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"I find that you have to blend in like a fish in water, *Searching For Washington Square This dedicated lifelong street quest to find and photograph both the animated and the ordinary in global scale has spun me around this world on uncountable occasions during ever-changing visual time periods; eras of fleeting international fashion, amazing social alteration, and historical political transformation. The experience has left me humbled by the astounding diversity of the Earth and acutely open-minded to the place’s many quirks. I was raised on the east coast of the USA and grew up wandering at every opportunity on the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village, and even more precisely at a place called Washington Square. It was a place where the world came to show the rest of us what it was made of. It was there that I noticed the appeal of common everyday street people and where I first saw buskers and street preachers working crowds and where I first experienced the zest of raving street poets. It was in that festive corner of this ‘round blue place at that vibrating crossroads of Earth that I recognized the fleeting bits of creative energy that an overcrowded community could muster on its best of days. The first time I encountered a Hollywood film being shot was on one of my first visits to Washington Square. While watching, I became acquainted with an army of gawking; not-for-profit street characters who regularly congregated there; a unique array of varied plot lines that no three-hour Hollywood epic might ever adequately capture. They brought their subtle talents to the Square, stoked it up, and showed it off as street theater to anyone at the fountain or on the benches or working on the movie who would bother to pay attention to them. Like the every-afternoon roller skater zipping by the moviemakers and disturbing their soundtrack - - the same one I saw years later on a television commercial selling Pepsi Cola’s summer freedom image with his graceful sweeping Washington Square roller act; or the rap singers and break-dancers I experienced on that street long before the rest of the world knew what either art form was; or even the visually rich group of bystander street people, involved in their own lives and captured in everyday moments unrelated to the zeal of their surroundings. Washington Square in New York City has always been a notoriously animated place and it possesses a rich history for inspiring the light of enthusiasm for everyday living, even when times have been bleak. Bounded by the fashionable vigor and youth of New York University and the renowned sophistication and diversity of The Village itself. Where academic study meets blue-collar stream-of-conscience prose. Where cops on the beat meet fast-talking pot peddlers. Where hot dog and pretzel vendors meet their customers. And where hot new fashion meets the cold hard streets. A place where the colors of self expression and individualism fly high above the white stone Washington arch, a monument that has fixed that corner of this place in my mind as the center of the Earth, the sensory soul of the human street spirit. It is not unlike a thousand other streets in hundreds of other lands. Places that tend their own festive spirits. Places where communities gather to watch and share. But having experienced what was possible at that most optimistic of places, and working around (and sometimes with) the other side of the street (the dark side), I have packed up my lust for travel and photography for the long run of a global street life. Wandering, traveling, and sleeping third class; living and working out of a backpack and a tent if I must to afford extended time spent on each street. Searching the world over in every corner I’ve landed in for the Washington Square in each place. In the past thirty years there have existed about 225 countries in this world and I have so far only had the opportunity to explore and capture fleeting bits and pieces of about 65 of them. However, the significant amount of time and the number of miles I've been permitted to dedicate to this lifelong study has afforded me a unique opportunity among artists at the turn of a millennium (in a progressively globally-conscious era) to present my different and distinct point of view. A thick slice of changing global street life through a single mind’s eye and my search for as many Washington Squares I can find in my allotted time on this tiny‘round blue place... The title essay from the 2000 book: Searching For Washington Square
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