Dérives: Street photography as post-/Situationist practice

Abstract

Street photography has hardly lacked for popular cultural currency, as attested by those ubiquitous black framed prints and coffee table tomes. However, it has long been a relatively marginalized genre within photography that has seen relative critical neglect even compared to other demotic forms concerned with the everyday, such as the family portrait (Bourdieu) and snapshot (Barthes). This article seeks to sketch a series of potential intersections between street photography’s antecedent, formative and breakout phases on both sides of the Atlantic and the Situationist International’s (1957‐72) embodied practices surrounding the dérive, détournement and psychogeography more generally. Arguably, remediating street photographic practice and composition in relation to these disruptive strategies can provide a kind of corrective to the more formalistic conception of the former, as exemplified in the reification of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous dictum of the ‘decisive moment’. I will argue that Situationist discourse helps reframe these moments of the street as ‘situations’ in the Situationist sense, lines of flight that became explicit when the development of street photography in Europe is overlaid with that of the United States, Paris with New York. Such détournement arguably brings into view vectors between street photography and revolutionary art practices often neglected in discussions of these Dérives of the street, and gestures towards ‐ at least in potentia ‐ a kind of afterlife of post-/Situationist praxis in the practices of street photographers.