Author’s Note: I’m doing something different from my typical interview feature today. My typical interview feature will return next month.
Recently, FRAMES held a workshop in NYC focused on street photography. I didn’t attend, but a couple of my Facebook acquaintances did, which means I have been seeing FRAMES NYC photos in my feed for a few weeks.
That started me thinking about street photography, a type of photo I do infrequently myself. I feel utterly uncomfortable doing it. I am self-conscious, so I seem obvious and intrusive. My best street work is done in large resort pools and beaches, where I can easily blend in as if I were “just another haole tourist with a camera.” While some people I know do not consider it ‘street’ because it was a ‘beach’, pools and the beach are a significant part of living in Honolulu. As always, with all things photography, my opinion tends to be more inclusive rather than less. Most photographers based in HI who do street work also classify this type of water imagery as ‘street.’ Here, you can’t get any more crowded than Waikiki; it certainly is like a carnival daily on the sands of Waikiki Beach!
Yet again, I find myself returning to the question, “Is there something more, something else, something different, that separates how and what women photograph?” As I have written previously, in my opinion, the true essence of the female gaze lies in women creating art crafted without considering the male ego or male desire but instead with the focus on the wishes of the female maker and female viewer.
But is that still possible in this genre of photography, where observing events unfolding around the photographer is the sole foundation on which the work rests? While researching this feature, I learned the jury is still out. Some speculate it is because the genre is not old enough. Others believe ‘the boys club’ has played gatekeeper to limit what is considered good work in street photography to mainly work made by men. Still, others believe that the number of women who practice in this area of photography is small enough to make it impossible to get a good survey of whether or not it is true. My gut opinion is that, in general, women street photographers are less apt to practice the aggressive, in-your-face photography style made infamous by Bruce Gilden. That’s something I find mostly done by men, so I do sense a difference in the work. However, other factors surrounding gender and acculturation could explain why women feel less safe roaming the streets alone, so they are perhaps more cautious in taking street images. I don’t know if that is the case; it’s just an idea I have.
Alexis Loftis, writing for Sartorial Magazine, said, “The beauty of the female gaze is that it aims to empathize rather than objectify, to show emotion and intimacy while also showing respect. This a refreshing idea compared to the control, dominance, and superficialities of the male gaze.” (Take note of this; it came up with a story behind one of the images here.)
In researching this month’s edition, I searched numerous sites for women doing exciting street photography. I approached 18 women whose work I wanted to use for this article; some I knew, and some were strangers to me. They lived in various places in the world. I heard back from 12 of the 18, and all of those agreed to have their work here. Some may be familiar to you, some not. One is a long-time active member of the FRAMES Facebook group. I’m a bit sad because I wanted to show someone doing the sort of “beach street” work I mentioned, but unfortunately, the person I contacted who routinely does that sort of work was one of the ones I did not hear back from. Without further delay, I present to you work from Alexa Van de Walle, Ashly Stohl, Donna Donato, Gina Costa, Isabelle Coordes, Jamie Johnson, Manuela Matos Monteiro, Nancy Scherl, Nina Welch-Kling, Safi Alia Shabaik, Susan Gans, Vera Saltzman.
This Alexa Van de Walle image immediately caught my attention on the Women Street Photographers site. There is little question about why: the image is elegant and gorgeous, yet it provides a cavalcade of detail. The light is exquisite, and a distant yet interesting background adds to the woman who is the focus. Van de Walle stated that one hot summer day, she was riding a subway with empty seats that lacked air conditioning. “The woman opened her fan to cool down, and the Coney Island amusement park was in the background. I knew I captured a special image when I saw the afternoon light and that the background, her face, and hand aligned perfectly with the window.” I agree! Much like in the 80s film “Body Heat,” you can see and feel the sweat and the heat via the woman’s glistening skin and expression. I’m not the sole arbiter in this woods; this image was a finalist in the Women Street Photographers Exhibition during the @romephotolab International Photo Festival in Rome this year.
For me, Donna Donato’s image’s fire-engine-red siding served as a frame for an all-but-empty restaurant and emphasized the unusual hats and their red embroidery. The image, in total, aroused my curiosity about the restaurant’s emptiness, the hats, the almost open window presence of these two people, and their relationship. The brilliant color of the imagery also attracted me. Donato told me she was passing by when she noticed the woman and a youth she assumed was the woman’s son wearing hats provided by the restaurant. She made the image using an iPhone SE 2020 and the Hipstamatic camera app. How come my Hipsta images never come out this well? I guess I have never really gotten the vibe of Hipsta down well enough to make it work for me the way Donato makes it work for her.
I was utterly captivated by this image by Gina Costa when I saw it years ago. Had I not known via our connection through FB photo communities that it was a street photo, I would have never guessed. It looks like an intentional portraiture work. The image is elegant, soft, and beautiful. In this photo, I declare that the result is much different than an image of the same woman on the street would look if taken by a man. I can feel Costa’s empathy for the broken woman (yes, woman, not shoe) in the lyrical quality of the image. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if we believe similarly to the Loftis quote I referenced earlier, Costa told me, “As soon as this photograph was first exhibited, the response to it was immediate and passionate. But what was remarkable to me was that the response was 100% gendered. The male response was how sad this beautiful woman broke the strap of her shoe. The female response was not about the shoe but rather the underlying broken state of the woman. They viewed her as a symbol of so many seemingly well-situated, comfortable, and privileged middle-class women who pay a heavy price for domestic comfort that only other women see and truly know.”
Isabelle Coordes is one of the women I had no previous acquaintance with when I began researching images for this feature. When I found this image, I fell in love with the dynamism she managed to portray within the frame. Usually, puddles without rain pounding upon them are quiet, still scenes. Coordes informed me the image was made at a spring Fair in her hometown of Munster, DE; her words melted my heart. “After days of heavy rain, the sun came out for the first time, magically lighting the scenery. People old and young enjoyed themselves, and a lighthearted atmosphere surrounded the place. I was drawn to a giant puddle reflecting sunbeams and silhouettes of the people passing by. Kneeling, I was so focused on capturing the scenery that I didn’t even notice my coat getting soaking wet! I felt people looking at me with irritation, and a nice woman pointed at my coat; I decided I had my final image. This episode encapsulates what street photography means to me: immersing myself into a situation while at the same time remaining on the threshold, being an observer of life unfolding around me while not being directly involved. Being totally present in this moment while forgetting about everything else – just like John Lennon wrote in his famous song “Watching the Wheels”—hence the title of this photo. Reflections are like a gateway, offering a new perspective on a subject by adding multiple layers to an ordinary scene. Suddenly, there is magic! A special light effect, layers of colors, a mysterious silhouette—discovering these hidden visual treasures really excites me. A photograph can instantly turn the fleeting ordinary moment into something special.” I don’t have more to add to that other than that I love her new-to-me work. The image is magical!
If you know Jamie Johnson’s work with Irish Travelers, you immediately recognize her style in this photograph. I was drawn to the girls’ attitude, which was made visible by Johnson. She has portrayed them as tough, cool, and disaffected, but simultaneously, she has visualized hints of the palpable uncertainty and insecurity lurking beneath the faces they show the world. About this work, Johnson stated, “Los Angeles is known for the glamour and sparkle of Hollywood, but the real faces of Los Angeles can be seen elsewhere. Some of the best representations are cruising on the east side, not Rodeo Drive.”
I was taken by this image of what appears to be teenage girls on the subway. What interested me was that Manuela Matos Monteiro caught a range of emotions and behaviors within the narrow behavior of teens staring at phones. One displays ennui, another seems engrossed, and both are engaged with their own phones, which is the standard behavior of ‘people with phones.’ Yet within the same group of girls, we see behavior seldom seen: two girls engrossed in one screen, smiling together at the content—having personal interaction—despite the phone. Monteiro conveyed, “On the Osaka to Nara metro, the passengers were silent and hunched over their mobile phones. A group of girls boarded: cheerful, chatting, sharing stories and screens. Their journey was short, but they gave me the most radiant 10 minutes of my two weeks in Japan. I associated those girls with cherry blossoms, full of promise.”
I’ve known Nancy Scherl for almost ten years, and I interviewed her in late 2022 for One Twelve Publications in conjunction with her book Dining Alone. As such, I am pretty familiar with her cinéma vérité-styled, social commentary imagery of solo diners. This one caught my eye because of the proliferation of solo diners within the same scene, which is unusual for her work. The distancing between the diners also screamed of the conditions of the recent terrible time of the pandemic. The image made a statement and left an impression on me that made me return to it multiple times. Scherl stated, “My connection to lone diners and solitude, which has fascinated me for decades, was reignited when I saw the bird’s eye view of the Washington Union Station. It was a moment that seemed to capture a unique aspect of public behavior, a transient phase when individuals become lone diners.”
Nina Welch-Kling is well-known for her diptych pairings created from her street photos. She has coined the term ‘Duoloques’ for them. About this pairing, she stated, “These photos are part of my ongoing series of diptychs called Duologues. It is a play between two images, creating a new meaning that belongs to neither—a discovery process each viewer interprets differently. Reminiscent of the idea of synchronicity, an idea that describes meaningful coincidences, my pairings intentionally produce uncanny relationships.” This work is a particularly striking image that I keep returning to over time, finding a new dialogue or piece of data each time. The imagery is bold, striking, and colorful in a way that most street work is not. Because Welch-Kling likes the viewer to make their own connection about the parings, she only informed me about each image separately, as follows:
“Red Hat was taken in Times Square, New York City, on a cold, wintry afternoon in January 2020. I was about to head home and caught sight of the blue side of a coffee truck. I decided to linger for a while to see what might evolve. I noticed a few costumed characters nearby trying to make a few bucks and being photographed with tourists, which is a constant in Times Square. One of the characters was wearing a red hat and standing in front of the blue wall and the city skyline, giving a sense of mystery by staying anonymous. When I returned to the exact location a few days later, the wall was no longer empty and blue but now covered with advertising for the truck. That confirms that nothing ever stays the same and that every photo taken becomes part of the history we write.
Flag was taken in February 2020 near my apartment in New York City. I spotted an American flag hanging outside a hardware store, backlit by the sun. People walked out from a nearby church, and I decided to linger for a while to see if I could create an interesting composition. A couple approached, and at that moment, the wind blew the flag to obstruct the passers-by, creating a sense of anonymity and mystery—something I always look for in my photography.”
This image by Safi Alia Shabaik screamed its themes at me when I viewed it. It’s simultaneously creepy, counterculture, sad, and perhaps touched by madness. The space holding it is stark, dreary, and run-down. It’s an impossible-to-forget image. At first, Shabaik kept her words short and said, “Creepy Clown lurking in the hallway. Don’t take balloons from strangers.”
She followed that with a verse from Poe’s The Raven:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
She ended by saying, “Sitting in the darkness, I felt a strange presence. I looked to my right, and there he was, just beyond the doorway, like a nightmarish fever dream.”
This image created by Susan Gans (likely familiar to readers who participate in the FRAMES FB group) is quirky and curious. We rarely see a street image taken this close up, especially when it involves someone else taking pictures with their phone. There is a visible propriety to the unseen woman’s attire and elegance to the pose, and then, there is that close-up of the phone screen filming something. Gans related this about the scene: “A formal-dressed woman in the row ahead sat quietly for a while and then suddenly stood to take a photo of performers on stage. I was interested in what she observed and wanted to document it, so I watched the way she aimed her phone and the shift in body language from emotionless to engaged and then photographed her to mark that moment.”
I don’t need to say much about why I chose this image by Vera Saltzman. It is dead-on, on the money, and on topic for the current American election season. (Sorry if you are a Trump supporter, I could never be.) The wild, childlike style of the graffiti, puzzlingly sprayed on the side of a house, underscores the emotions of its words and gives the human presence to what otherwise would be a landscape-type image. What’s a head scratcher for me is why this happened in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. Saltzman said, “I found this in a back alley in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. 8 years later, the message is still the same. It seems even scarier this time around.” I agree—much scarier.
Author’s Note: Given the location, when I saw this image as a recent post on Instagram, I thought it was a street image. I later learned it was from Stohl’s Charth Vader series. I decided to include it anyway due to the circumstances of the picture—it takes place in a public bathroom, Stohl’s forced by circumstance outsider’s view, and the arrangement of helmet, feet, and stall. It just seems like a street photo.
It’s not hard to love this image by Ashly Stohl; it made me laugh. If, like me, you did not know the story of Stohl’s son, Charlie, who at age seven was dubbed ‘Charth Vader,’ due to his attachment to the Star Wars character Darth Vader, you, like me, might see this and think, “What on earth is going on in that stall? This is the women’s room? Did I end up at a school rather than the mall?” After all, without knowing the story in advance, the image sheds no clues that the photographer knew the subject. Since Stohl is dealing with a son in a mask whose eyes are hidden, it transcends pure mother-capturing-child work (as does the rest of the series, I might add, but for a different reason than in this image.) The way his identity is obscured and the setting make the message here universal. In 2015, Stohl spoke to Lenscratch about the series, stating, “This could be the struggle of any child that feels small, frustrated, confused, and sometimes mad. We all remember feeling like that, and sometimes we still do as adults.” Yes, we do. The image also somehow fits with the Halloween season upon us now—and what we might find in the restroom on Halloween.
I hope FRAMES readers have enjoyed a quick peek into some of the kinds of imagery being made now by women practicing the art of street photography.
Thank you to all the artists for allowing me to present your work to our FRAMES readers. I’m looking forward to seeing more of your work!
ARTIST BIOS
Alexa Van de Walle (Lexi) is a NYC-based street and documentary photographer. She is a retired marketing executive with an MBA from Kellogg/Northwestern University. Van de Walle gave up her career in 2016 to pursue her passion—photography. She has exhibited in group shows at the Rome International Photo Festival with Women Street Photographers, SoHo Photo Gallery, Atlantic Gallery, the Salmagundi Club, and The StreetSoup Gallery (Milan). de Walle is an active member of Women Street Photographers and Professional Women Photographers and Develop Portfolio Development; her 2024 eclipse photos were published in PetaPixel.
Ashly Stohl is a photographer based in Los Angeles and New York, and co-founder and Publisher of Peanut Press, an independent photobook publisher. Ashly was born and raised in Los Angeles and has a BS in Chemistry from UCSB. Her acclaimed series, Charth Vader, tells the story of her visually impaired son. The book Charth Vader, published in 2014, went viral, selling out in two weeks. The book was featured in over 50 articles and appeared on ABC TV News. Stohl has since published two additional monographs and continues photographing her family and most intimate relationships with her characteristic dark humor. As a co-founder of Peanut Press, she uses her experience in design and book publishing to partner with other photographers in making high-quality photo books. She has lectured and presented nationally at Columbia University, SPE National, and The Penumbra Foundation, to name a few. Her photographs are in the collections of Yale University, Emory University, Washington University in St Louis, and other significant institutions. She has exhibited extensively, and photographs from her most recent book, Disappear Here, are currently on view at the Leica Gallery in Miami.
Donna Donato says, “I call myself an image-maker because I was born a storyteller, am a historian by training, and a film/video editor by vocation. I have an innate need to document the world around me, either through photography, writing, or oral recounting. Though I’ve lived in several places, such as Colorado, California, Oklahoma, Washington, DC, Paris, France, and New York City, sometimes for long periods, I consider myself a nomad. I live in Paris, where my partner and I act as flaneurs, documenting the city we love.”
Gina Costa is a photographic artist, museum professional, and independent curator. She has graduate degrees in art history from the University of Chicago. Costa worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) and the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at several universities and colleges. She received awards in the 2018 and 2019 Julia Margaret Cameron Photography awards and the 2016 Latin American Photography awards. Costa’s work has been featured in Lensculture, F-Stop Magazine, and Lenscratch. She has given workshops about mobile photography in the US and Europe and is an internationally known, published, award-winning photographer.
Isabelle Coordes writes, “I am a self-taught photographer from Münster, Germany. My passion for literature, poetry, and music strongly influences how I see the world. As a child growing up, I immersed myself in fairy tails, novels, and song lyrics, and I have been expressing my thoughts in written form ever since. Over time, though, visual language became my dominant expression. Street photography is my main interest, but I am also working on documentary and conceptual art projects. I am an active member and curator at Progressive Street, an international group of photographers, and I am engaged in various photography collectives. My work has been published in multiple magazines and online platforms and has been shown in exhibitions around the globe.”
Jamie Johnson is a photographer specializing in documenting children and childhood and wet-plate collodion photography. From Laos to Cuba, from the Amazon to Mongolia, she has found a universality in the world of children, and her passion grows stronger with each new adventure. Her wet plate collodion series, Vices, has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums from Los Angeles, London, and Paris, has been published in dozens of magazines, and is in the permanent collection of several museums. Her documentary work with children has been included in the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2017 and 2019 and prized by collectors. Her first monograph, Growing Up Travelling, published by Kehrer Verlag in September 2020, was named the Best PhotoBook of 2020 by numerous publications. In Fall 2021, she won Photographer of the Year 2021 for her work with the Irish Traveller children.
Manuela Matos Monteiro is a dedicated photographer and a curator of exhibitions and a Photography Biennale in Portugal. She has juried for many photo competitions and, along with João Lafuente, is the director of the three MIRA Galleries in Porto, Portugal: MIRA FORUM (photography), Espaço MIRA (contemporary art), and MIRA | artes performativas (performance and contemporary art). Monteiro studied and taught Philosophy and Psychology and has published books on Pedagogy and Psychology. As a photographer, she displayed her work in individual exhibitions in Portugal, the European Parliament (Brussels), Paris, Bordeaux, Maputo, and Beira (Mozambique), and collective exhibitions in NYC, Paris, Miami, Florence, Verona, and Kansas City. Two of her works were exhibited at the Biennale Berlin 2017.
Nancy Scherl is a fine art photographer specializing in social documentary portraiture. She was awarded an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, following undergraduate studies in documentary and fine art photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scherl is a member, Treasurer, and President Emeritus of the American Society of Media Photographers and a Katonah Museum Artists’ Association board member. Scherl founded and produces “Coffee Shop Talk,” a round table discussion series about art. Awards that have honored her work include the PX3 Prix De La Photographie Paris, the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, and Photolucida’s Critical Mass. Venues in which her work was exhibited include A Smith Gallery, South x Southeast, the Katonah Museum of Art’ and the Hammond Museum. She resides in NYC. Her first monograph, Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude, was published by Daylight Books in 2022.
Nina Welch-Kling is a German-born photographer who lives and works in New York City. Welch-Kling holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Architecture from The University of California, Los Angeles. She has been a recipient of the LenCulture Critics’ Choice Award as well as a finalist in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards. Welch-Kling’s work has been included in multiple international photography exhibitions and numerous magazine and online publications, including The Guardian, The Eye of the Photographer, British Journal of Photography, Dazed, Musée Magazine, and TheModernMet.com. In 2021, she was one of eight women named a Hasselblad Heroine. Welch-Kling’s first monograph, Duologues, was published by Kehrer Verlag in the Fall of 2022.
Safi Alia Shabaik, known by her moniker flashbulbfloozy, is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and experimental video. Her photographic work explores identity, persona, transformation, daily life, and the humanity of all people; her subject matter spans the self, family, street life, fringe, and counterculture. She exhibits her work nationally, has been featured in various publications and podcasts, has earned recognition in PhotoLucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, and has received a visual arts grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A lover of the human form, she is also an award-winning mortician.
Susan Gans is a street photographer based in Alexandria, Virginia, after spending 30 years in Seattle, Washington. She completed a Certificate in Photography at the University of Washington Extension Program, the Artist Trust EDGE Professional Development Program, and studied at the Photographic Center NW in Seattle. Gans has a BA from the University of Maryland, College Park in Studio Art/Humanities, and an MA from New York University in Art Education/Printmaking. She served as a Museum Educator and Curator at the former Corcoran Gallery of Art and Wadsworth Atheneum and Director of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum Project at Carnegie Museum of Art. Gans also directed non-profits, including Maryland Hall in Annapolis, MD, and the Rye Arts Center in Rye, NY. She is an Affiliate member of Gallery 110, a non-profit artist space in Seattle, WA. Although Gans’ work has been shown primarily in the Pacific Northwest over the past 20 years, venues in which she has exhibited include PCNW, Gallery 110, the Athenaeum, the Center on Contemporary Art, and the (now-closed) NO Gallery (NYC.) Gans’ work is in public and private collections on both coasts.
Struggling to fit in after moving from Nova Scotia to Nunavut, Vera Saltzman turned to her photography to build a bridge between herself and the Inuit, a friendship of sorts – a visual record of an intangible exchange. She later completed a portfolio development program at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa. Her work focuses on issues of identity and the development of a “sense of place,” the passage of time, and the fragility of life. She currently lives in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. Saltzman received the top prize in the Saskatchewan Prairie Light Photography Festival, two Applied Arts Awards for creative excellence, and her series “The Shacks” won a place in the international journal The Creative Quarterly. She was a finalist for the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, a Top 200 Finalist for Photolucidia’s Critical Mass, and short-listed for FotoFilmic 18. Saltzman’s work has been displayed at venues such as Photoville FENCE (Calgary), Art Toronto, and the Ottawa Art Gallery. She has also exhibited internationally in Oregon, San Francisco, Spain, and South Korea and has appeared in numerous print and virtual publications. Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, represents Saltzman’s work.
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