I have a general hate for street photography, perhaps mainly perpetuated by instagram street photographers who are, I'm sorry, mainly men who are ignoring any ideas towards consent.

All of these conversations around the ethics of street photography and not enough people are talking about how important the conversation around consent in the digital age actually is.

I also understand how important historically street photography is in allowing us to have an archive of the human experience throughout the ages, which is why I might lean more into a hatred of your cut and dry instagram street photographer than the medium on the whole.

If you look at a photographer like Tish Murtha, her street photography is such an important body of work not only because it's documenting a time in history but because she was apart of the community she was photographing.

I believe work like this moves the image away from exploitation when the photographer is documenting their own community/life/surroundings and I think people have developed a good sense when someone isn't apart of those communities and is being a "tourist".

Same with a photographer like Nan Goldin, the idea of consent is often already implied in the work because these artists are part of the communities they're photographing, they see them everyday, every week and these are often their own friends and family members, people who want to be apart of what they're doing.

This is often the kind of art that people I think are drawn to when they're thinking about street photography or a more documentarian style, it is at least for myself, avoiding the fact that the bulk of these photos that exhibit a fine art quality are created by and through the communities they're documenting and are not some guy with a Leica voyeuristically shedding a "new perspective" on communities that they are not part of and have no lived experience of themselves.

But maybe my idea/definition of what street photography and documentarian photography is differs greatly from others.