There is a trend going across the popular video social media platform TikTok that shows photographers, calling themselves “street photographers” wandering the streets and asking people on the streets for a picture, resulting in taking their portraits on the street.

This is NOT street photography, I’m sure Henri Cartier-Bresson is turning in his grave when he hears these trendy photographers calling themselves street photographers when indeed they are portrait photographers taking images on the street.

It might sound the same, but I can assure you it really isn’t and someone needs to tell them the basis of the trend is flawed!

@iamjeanblack
♬ original sound – Jean Black

While TikTok user iamjeanblack seems like a friendly fellow and was very polite and did take some nice images of the man he stopped, this is not pure street photography capturing candid moments on the street of unexpecting people. 

This is all intent and purpose, it’s a photo shoot or a portrait session in a park… NOT street photography. But it doesn’t stop there, hundred of TikTok users are now calling themselves Street Photographers and using the basis of this trend to take photos out in public.

While I love the idea of more people picking up a camera and getting into photography, I’d like them to understand street photography first and then decide that while it’s not street photography, they are taking great portraits and are therefore portrait photographers.

@ryukstyles
♬ lovely – lovely

Again, amazing photos from ryukstyles, and having the portable printer with him is a nice touch…. But it’s not street photography, where are the dramatic scenes, candid moments within a slit-second of life – this just isn’t street photography.

While I sound like a boring old fart going on about how this isn’t that and why are they calling it this, in anything, there is a process, a process of learning, striving to be the best in your field and this trend just feels like a gimmick, a gimmick and a punch in the gut to the great street photographer that have been and gone, and to the great that have worked their craft for years.

I am sure this trend will continue, because who wouldn’t follow the crowd to get views, but I just think it is very weird and really does not sit well with me that people and photographers think this is street photography – for the fiftieth time – It’s NOT street photography.

The highly anticipated final phase of the V&A Photography Centre is now open, and no matter what area of photography holds your interest, this news is worthy of your attention.

The V&A was the first museum to collect photographs, beginning in the 1850s, when it was known as the South Kensington Museum. Today, the collection is comprised of over a million objects related to the history of photography, including photographs, negatives, cameras, technical equipment, books, periodicals, and archival material. The origins of the photography collection in the V&A are intertwined with the development of the Museum itself. The first museum director, Henry Cole, was an amateur photographer, and a keen supporter of the art of photography in a time where the medium was considered as more of a science than an art.

The first phase of the dedicated Photography Centre opened in 2018, which doubled the space dedicated to photography at the V&A South Kensington. The opening of the second and final phase in 2023 means that there is now 1,000 square meters of dedicated space for photography within the V&A. Across seven galleries, the center showcases objects from the beginnings of photography alongside cutting-edge new commissions. 

The collection can be visited both online and in person, including the Royal Photographic Society archive, which was transferred to the V&A in 2017.

The University of Illinois at Chicago in its original form was a bold and mysterious place when it opened in the mid-1960s on the city’s West Side.

The idiosyncratic campus of modernist buildings linked by elevated concrete walkways, with a huge outdoor amphitheater called the Circle Forum at its center, was disliked by more than a few.

Then-Sun-Times architecture critic M.W. Newman famously dubbed the campus “Fortress Illini.”

But photographer Orlando Cabanban, hired by architect Walter Netsch of SOM to document the new university, saw things differently.

Cabanban’s photography depicted a bustling campus of unique buildings — a counterpoint to the criticism UIC had received.

“I liked the design,” Cabanban, now 89, says with a smile.

A licensed architect who switched to photography early in his career during the 1960s, the Chicago-born Cabanban was hired by top architecture firms to document their work.

And while he didn’t become as well-known as architectural image-makers such as Hedrich-Blessing, or Ezra Stoller, his UIC work alone shows he could give them a run for their money.

If you find midcentury images of signature buildings such as Marina City or Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist at 55 E. Wacker Dr., it’s likely Cabanban was behind the lens.

In 1995, as part of the Art Institute’s Chicago Architects Oral History Project, interviewer Betty Blum asked Netsch who was his preferred photographer.

“Well, I had three,” Netsch said. “The photographer Balthazar Korab from Detroit … And our local photographer Hedrich-Blessing. The other one was Orlando Cabanban.”

Architecture and more

Cabanban photographed the Raymond Hilliard Homes, 30 W. Cermak Rd., for architect Bertrand Goldberg in 1966.

The photographer captured Hilliard’s curves, shooting parts of the cylindrical development through its lozenge-shaped windows.

But the standout of the Hilliard bunch is a low-angle shot of a young boy on his bicycle, peering down into Cabanban’s camera while a 15-story Hilliard senior citizens building looms behind him.

“I saw him riding around and just asked him to pose,” Cabanban remembered. “I was there photographing the construction of the buildings.”

Architecture photographers of the time frequently didn’t include people in their images — the design is the thing — but Cabanban was among the exceptions.

As Netsch told Blum: “Orlando would always photograph with people, and I like that.”

Placing individuals within his architectural photography also illuminates a lesser-known part of Cabanban’s career: He documented people as a street photographer, and on assignments for the Field Museum and the Community Renewal Society.

Cabanban also traveled to the Philippines to photograph family members and the town in which his father was born.

He also photographed a 1966 Loop demonstration led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I think I favor the people photographs,” Cabanban said. “That was my first love.”

For the Field, Cabanban photographed Mexican Americans living in the south suburbs during the 1960s. The photographs show weddings, gatherings in the park — even some cattle-wrangling event.

The museum also assigned Cabanban to document Native Americans in Chicago and in the Southwest.

“I went to the powwows, and I danced. I learned to dance just, you know, just going around in a circle, pounding my feet,” Cabanban laughed.

Perhaps a photographic story to tell

UIC looks more traditional today. There are some new buildings, and the walkways and Circle Forum were removed in the 1990s.

Cabanban’s masterful images of UIC — seen around the world at the time — remain the best and most thorough photographic record of the original out-of-this-world campus.

Meanwhile, Cabanban has put down the Nikons, Hasselblads and Sinars and retired from photography.

“No, I don’t shoot anymore,” he said. “I photograph my grandchildren though, once in a while when I get a good camera in my hands.”

Cabanban wonders if a book of his work might be in order. In addition to SOM, Goldberg and Weese, Cabanban’s client list reads like an architectural who’s who of the era, including the likes of Perkins & Will and Mies van der Rohe.

Here’s hoping it happens. Packaged the right way along with Cabanban’s street and ethnographic photography, it could all make for a compelling new look at the people and places of 20th century Chicago.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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