Street photography didn’t begin with the invention of the camera. It began with the street itself—chaotic, dramatic, full of life. Paris was the birthplace of this visual theater, and even before photos, people were watching. Writers like Baudelaire created the concept of the flâneur, a person who wandered the city observing it all. This way of looking would later translate directly into the gaze of the street photographer.

In the mid-1800s, Baron Haussmann transformed Paris from a labyrinth of alleys into a stage for modern life, filled with wide boulevards, public gatherings, and visual stimuli. Artists responded. Painters like Daumier and Manot, sketchers like Constantin Guys, and writers like Victor Fournel began documenting everyday life in the city—long before photography could do it effectively.

Their work focused on street kids, workers, crowds, and café-goers—real people in real places. Artists were trying to capture fleeting expressions, gestures, and mood. Baudelaire even praised Guys as “the painter of modern life” for his ability to depict the moment with urgency. This aesthetic impulse—to capture life as it happens—predates photography but deeply informed what it would become.

Photography entered this world of rapid visual observation with technical limitations. When William Henry Fox Talbot created The Pencil of Nature, he didn’t believe street photography was possible. Subjects moved too quickly for the long exposure times required. He stated plainly that photos of the “moving multitude” couldn’t be done.

But his apprentice Richard Jones, along with Talbot’s cousin, proved otherwise. Their ghostlike images—where blurred figures moved through the frame—hinted at motion in a way that felt alive. These “mistakes” revealed photography’s potential to capture the street’s energy, even if only in spirit.

Other early pioneers pushed these boundaries. Reverend George Bridges created over 1,700 negatives in six years. Charles Nègre worked on solving the problem of motion, using faster lenses and stereographs. His photo Chimney Sweeps Walking is a bold attempt to catch subjects mid-step, making movement a worthy subject, not just a technical challenge.

Many of these early photographers weren’t just artists; they were tools for artists. Talbot’s cathedral photos were intended as references for painters. Nègre even created a photo album specifically for artists to use, painting directly over his images. Painters like Monet were working in parallel, chasing fleeting light on canvas. Everyone—regardless of medium—was obsessed with capturing the moment.

The book Bystander argues that street photography emerged just as the broader art world was wrestling with the same question: how do you capture the now? No medium was better suited to the instantaneous than photography. From the start, street photography wasn’t just a documentation style—it was part of a larger cultural movement trying to understand the modern world.

As technology shifted toward more complex processes like wet-plate photography, street photography slowed. Long exposure times made it hard to work candidly. But in 1877, John Thomson published Street Life in London—the first true street photography book. He posed his subjects out of necessity, but his goal was clear: to show life as it really looked, not as it was imagined in studios.

Thomson’s work carried forward the same spirit of Baudelaire’s flâneur. His images showed people in the midst of their real environments, with tension between formality and authenticity. This same tension would follow street photography for decades: how much control should a photographer have? How real is real? Thomson also worked abroad, producing Illustrations of China and Its People and Through Cyprus with the Camera. In an era when many travel photos were staged in studios, he and others like Emil Rusefeldt and Donald Mennie shot candidly in the streets. Their efforts marked a shift: travel photography became about documentation, not fantasy.

Photographers like Samuel Bourne noted how hard it was to capture natural poses abroad—people stiffened, posing unnaturally. Only by keeping a distance could photographers maintain authenticity. Thomson learned this through experience, as seen in his photo Hookey Alf, where unpredictability entered his work. He stopped trying to control the scene and started embracing what happened in front of him.

This openness marked a turning point. As Bystander puts it, “street photographs had, in the earliest stages of photographic history, a significance that reached beyond photography alone.” When photographers started welcoming the messiness of life, they laid the groundwork for what the genre would become.

And with that, we’re ready to move forward. The next part of this series will explore what happens when photographers fully embraced the street, spontaneity, and the unexpected—letting go of control and allowing the world to speak for itself.