David Snider's Street Pictures

To explain my opinion on Snider's fantastic work would be redundant...everyone has pretty much said in one way or another how I feel about it. The work and the intricate attention to detail convey vivid emotion, and his each one of his photos catches the eye in one way or another.

The thing that really got me, however, was the fact that he was taking these pictures of COMPLETE STRANGERS. One of my classmates touched on this, but a lot of these pictures look staged...they are just too perfect to have been taken randomly. I am by no means accusing Snider of setting up his photographs, instead I marvel at his ability to somehow blend into the environment so well that people were able to continue their lives as if he weren't there. I know that whenever I sense that a camera lens is pointed at me, and it is not a time to pose, I feel pressured to act as if I normally would, but then, in turn, in my quest for normalcy, I act unnatural, stiff, and awkward. This has happened in some of my previous quests to take pictures of others as well. Yet somehow Snider captures life without the awkwardity (word?). Granted, I am almost positive that there are hundreds of pictures that he did not use, but he has a gift. It is incredible.