Street photography: obsession over talent, but luck over everything

Talent is overrated, especially in street photography where perseverance is critical. Street photography is in great part a statistical question (poets and romantics stay away from here). I know that it sounds a bit weird but the more time you will spend on the streets, the more people you will meet and the more statistical chance you will have to find a good scene to photograph. You can be talented but without exercise, practice and perseverance you will fail.

Obsession beats talent as Adam Sandler said in the recent beautiful Hustle movie. You have to be totally involved in street photography by practicing, studying, failing and failing again.

But it’s not over. You can be talented (or become talented), you can be obsessed and practice a lot but at the end of the day without luck or serendipity (or what it is) you are alone in the streets.

It’s a pessimistic idea of (probably) a pessimistic person and photographer but luck is over everything, in photography/art as in life, health, family. Of course you can try “to create” fortune in such way by practicing day by day. But you need luck at the end!!! It’s like a man who wants to win the lottery, the more he buys tickets the more chances he has, but to win in the end he still needs luck. Same in photography.

Have you ever seen Match Point by Woody Allen or the recent Coupe the chance (always by Woody Allen)? These movies tell stories about luck and how it can affect a man’s life changing our sorts. Similar concept also in Serious Man directed by J and E. Coen, a movie that shows you that sometimes simply stuff happens without our control, and we can’t do anything about it. How many times I go out in the streets without finding anything to photograph. When I go back home I reflect: was it my fault? Of course not this time!

Obviously in the same time you need also talent to take good pictures because “you have to know what to see clicking the shutter in the right moment and place”.

I post below a sequence of street photos taken by me in which luck and chance did most of the work, simply that’s it. I’didn’t work the scenes (except for one photo), everything was good in these examples; I walked and took photos, simply.

street photography Rome