Reuben Radding: Rousing New Discussions Around Street Photography

Reuben Radding: Rousing New Discussions Around Street Photography

Street photography has gone a long way since pioneers like Eugene Atget laid the groundwork in the 1890s, shifting from candid documentation of the everyday to creative depictions of mundane moments. Brooklyn-based photographer, writer, and musician Reuben Radding has done a good mix of both, his photos garnering awards, landing exhibitions, and appearing in publications since the early 2010s. In 2019, he received his MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard Community College and won Third Place in the Lenscratch Student Awards. He has also been a photography educator since 2013, teaching in the New York Institute of Photography (2014 – present) and the International Center of Photography (2022 – present) apart from the occasional workshops, lectures, and speaking appearances.

Radding’s work has been described as both a celebration of life and a window to the everyday, but he also regards his work as an improvisation guided by all that is human — energy, emotions, interactions, and all. More important to him, however, is for his work to transcend the confines of a single genre, not wanting to limit his practice to what it could dictate or represent. As such, despite long hours wandering New York City and practically operating as a street photographer, he considers himself simply as a photographer dedicated to the real work of the artist. By adapting a stream of consciousness approach that combines street photography with personal documentary, he is able to connect with his city and its people, becoming “a part” instead of “being apart.”

Radding culminates this intention with the release of his first photo book, Heavenly Arms, in 2024. Published by Red Hook Editions, it also won the 2nd Place Prize in the International Photography Awards (IPA) 2025, Book Category. The selection of 63 black and white photos featured in the book was curated from a decade’s worth of work from New York City and beyond, and dubbed as a “meditation on human interconnectedness, conflict, and the musicality of American life.”

On the meaning behind the book and the title itself, he points to the Afterword he wrote:

“Over the 10 years’ time that I spent making this work I have walked through long stretches of not knowing. I did not always understand exactly what I was making, but I always believed, as Jack Kerouac suggested, ‘something that you feel will find its own form.’ This book contains many of my feelings and observations about human connection––the ways we celebrate it or try to get it, the ways we yearn for it or reject it, and also the absence of it. Everywhere I turn I see the one ultimate problem facing our world, the lie that says we’re separate. Because of my photography and the way I practice it, I feel connected to the essence in ways I never could previously achieve. The heavenly arms of the earthly human spirit are all around me, holding me back and beckoning to me, tossing me around in the wildness of life, and gathering me back in, in sweet, sweet protection. I surrender. I offer myself in all vulnerability to its care and indifference. I do not control much of anything and I don’t believe I should. I accept not knowing, and I accept the certainty of death. I take each day as a waking dream of freedom.”

Curious about his notion of challenging the norms and expectations tied to street photography, we invited Radding to expand and rethink the discussions surrounding the genre in the insightful interview below.

While you prefer to not to categorize your work under a single genre, the setting you work in and your process undeniably echo the elements often identified with street photography. How do you reconcile your own notion of the photography you do with how viewers see your work?

It doesn’t really matter to me. I’ve learned from experience that people come to the work in myriad pathways and how they arrive at it will give them a particular perception, or a partial one, and they bring along preconceptions that can’t be accounted for. I have little to no control over this. I don’t mind if people call me a street photographer, but when I used to think of myself this way I risked unconsciously limiting my practice to what I thought that meant. This is contrary to my values and inhibits my growth, so I prefer to just think of myself as a photographer. Categories are just marketing.

We see life in color, so it’s not surprising that the greatest painters largely painted in color. However, some photographers only shoot in black and white. Why do you think they choose to change reality this way?

I cannot speak for anyone but myself, so I can’t tell you why others make their choices. I will say though that while we do see life in color, photographs are not life. They are not reality. Even color photographs are a massive reduction of that reality. Reality is three-dimensional, doesn’t have edges, and includes food for our non-sighted senses, like sound and smell. Reality is also in motion. Photographs are frozen fragments of that continuum of time. A black and white photo is just one more step of reduction.

I discovered early on that when my photos looked too much like reality they annoyed me. They felt less magical and alive. Reality is not where I wish to live. Reality is disappointing. I want to live in that magical space that activates possibility, imagination and memory.

It’s interesting to consider that until the early 1970’s no one dared show color photographs as art. Black & white was considered the palate of serious photography and color was associated with either commercial work, or amateur snapshots. Early practitioners of color shown in museums, and eventually galleries, were inundated with questions about why they would be so weird as to use color. Now it’s more than 50 years later and artists like myself are continually asked why we shoot black and white. What seems to have happened is that we have collectively traded in one stupid orthodoxy for another. I have no use for orthodoxies. All they do is limit growth and keep us stuck in a cycle of distraction from the things that really matter.

Do you think we can reframe the street photography in color vs. black and white discussion in a different way?

Yes, let’s start by taking away the “vs.” in your question. Everything is available and not everything is binary. There’s great work in color and there’s great work in black & white. Some people even combine them! It’s time we looked past palate and asked ourselves about the feelings and forms within the images, and what they have to say about deeper human concerns.

Recently I curated a group show here in Brooklyn. Five of the 11 photographers in the exhibition showed black & white pictures and each of our black & white palates were quite different. How satisfying it was to prove once and for all that when people ask about color vs. black and white the assumption is that all color is the same, and all monochrome is the same. It’s not true at all.

As a photography educator, what do you find to be the biggest roadblock to artistic evolution today? How do you help your students overcome it in their own photography journey?

This is a tough question, because I don’t really see one dominating roadblock outpacing the others. There’s too many, and different ones seem to dominate at different times, and vary depending on age and experience. One problem that I can’t help students with is that a lot of people just don’t work hard enough. To really grow into finding yourself as a photographer takes a lot of shooting. Street photography will take as much as you’re willing to give it, and just casually dipping in and out of it and treating it like a part time hobby will not yield the same growth and learning as going hard at it. Everybody’s in a hurry nowadays. They want results and they want to know exactly where they’ll get them from. They want shortcuts. This kind of photography laughs at that. You have to take an incredible amount of bad pictures to not only find the good ones, but to find out what YOUR good ones are, and what makes them yours.

Truly, I believe that everyone already has an artistic voice in them, and that revealing it is most often a matter of removing obstacles to that voice. Aside from the issue of not working enough, students’ voices are often stifled by imitating others, trying to fit in, or limiting beliefs. Even the language they’ve arrived at to think about what they are making can limit them. For instance, I encourage people to stop thinking of what they’re doing as “capturing.” That word keeps people in the mindset of thinking a picture’s success is based on whether the image objectively describes reality, and the best pictures aren’t about that, but about activating powers of the medium to create questions, or problems, or impossibilities that are only visible in a picture: transformations of reality.

Probably the most dangerous foible in street photography that gets reinforced by language is the whole notion of “storytelling.” 99% of the time when someone describes a photo or even a series of them as telling a story, or building a narrative, it’s just total bullshit. It’s an attempt to seek meaning through a metaphor that sounds good, or is a total cop-out, ignoring commendable things that actually are going on in their work. It’s easier to talk about storytelling than it is to grapple with the things good photos actually can do. Great photos are more like poems than stories. Poetry is typified by having the musicality of language as its highest priority, not accuracy of facts or of reporting on events. If the words don’t make you feel a taste in your mouth or feel a lightning in your mind, it doesn’t matter what facts or beliefs they describe. Pictures are like that.

I can point all of these things out to students, and I often will, but the real basis of my teaching practice is to direct students towards experiences that sidestep their will to control. I encourage them to work from first thought rather than intelligence or predetermined concepts. I witness them through a process rather than point to a result they should find. Recently I have advised them to point their camera at things they are afraid of, or that they don’t understand, or that make them feel so gushingly in love that they lose control. The results have been a joy to see.

You mentioned seeking new questions about the medium and breaking away from the concerns that many photographers still grapple with. To you, what are the more important inquiries or ideas that photographers should instead be tackling today?

It all starts with disposing of the old questions whose answers were made self-evident long ago. The problem with debating all those binary questions like color vs. black and white, analog vs. digital, documentary vs. fine art, male vs. female gaze, etc. is that “solving the problem” only leads you back to the problem. The great pictures throughout the history of street photography have demonstrated myriad insights into the problem of living, the miracle of existence, and limitless ways to connect. Why don’t we talk about those instead of style?

If you look at the history of what great art, cinema, music, or theater has been able to address and express, even just in human terms, there’s a lot of questions photographers could ask that are not binary pathways or surface-level descriptions. Think of all the great Shakespearean themes like vanity, jealousy, sacrifice, virtue, or dishonesty. How can we make our work about something more than drawing a rectangle around something we like? The material of life is full of fascinating problems and disappointments, unlikely heroics and bravery, foolishness and folly and always the spectre of our own mortality. I think if we focus on these things instead of 60 year old questions we might have a shot at making something a lot more more lasting and relevant.

But maybe we can also keep it simple. Garry Winogrand said we know too much about pictures and what makes them look like they do, so how do you keep from making the same pictures over and over? That right there is a question far more generative and forward-looking than “is medium format better than 35mm?”

In one of your YouTube interviews, you talked about one of your photos as being lucky that you got the shot. What is the significance of luck in street photography? Does it even have any significance at all?

Sure, it has significance when it’s significant. Some pictures are imbued with luck. In the case of that one, the majority of its strengths were not perceived by me in the making of the picture, and the likelihood of them coinciding with the moment that triggered me to click the shutter was pretty slim. I could not have planned or pre-seen it. That’s a rehearsed luck that a lot of good street photography capitalizes on. There are quite a few pictures in my book, Heavenly Arms, which are a result of this same brand of luck.

Luck isn’t the only way great pictures happen, but one of the things I like about lucky pictures is that they often embrace a sense of risk. It might be the risk that the picture could just as easily have been a failure or gone unnoticed. I used to play music that was totally improvised and for the audiences that loved it the appeal wasn’t that it all worked or made sense, but that there was always the sense that it could fall apart any second. A lot of photographers try to improve by reducing risk and finding repeatable methods and results. I’d much rather they make discoveries through taking chances.

Everything is a matter of degrees, isn’t it? If a tightrope walker’s cable is only two feet off the ground you aren’t going to be hanging on their every step the way you would if they are 50 feet in the air.

What do you consider to be the greatest challenge in doing street photography in a city as big, iconic, and constantly photographed as New York City?

The problem of trying to make something that you haven’t seen before is more or less the same wherever you go. It’s interesting to me that people outside NYC often ask this question, but most of the New York photographers I know don’t feel hampered by this issue at all. What people forget is that New York is a place that is constantly changing, is incredibly varied, full of surprises, and small differences in how you point a camera can seem to present totally different worlds.

So the real challenge of shooting here is that no matter how interesting it is, or how full of activity, it’s still just really hard to get a great picture, period.

Considering the sheer volume of images created since the advent of digital technology and social media, do you think that the standards of editorial work (by the old-fashioned photo desk editors) in general, has advanced or regressed?

I don’t have any sense of how technology has or hasn’t influenced the standards of editorial work. That’s not really my field. Most of the editors I have dealt with seem to have no imagination and are unwilling to take risks, and in that regard nothing has changed over the time I’ve paid any attention. As always there are some editors out there who are sensitive, smart and have a more creative sense of the possibilities of pictures, and I’m grateful to know a couple of them, but I don’t care about making editorial work.

How conscious of composition must a street photographer (or a lens-based artist who chose the streets as their “playground”) be? Or do you think composition comes instinctively out in the streets?

I believe that the two most critical aspects of a majority of pictures are form and content. Being conscious of composition in the act of shooting usually means repeating logics we recognize, and I want to find new constructions. Whatever gets me there is good. Where one does need to be conscious is in the stage of evaluating the resulting pictures. Photos that don’t capitalize on possibilities of form or “composition” aren’t worth as much to me as ones that do. Form won’t always save you though! I have had numerous students in the last couple years drive themselves crazy trying to find ways to incorporate formal ideas like “layering” to the exclusion of the many other forces photos deal in, only to find that you can just as easily make a forgettable picture with layers as you can with one that offers a flat sense of space.

Lastly, where do you see or place yourself in the history of street photography (let’s say from the 1970s to the present)?

That’s not something I get to decide. It’s for other people to say. There are artists I relate to from the distant past, and some who are around today who I feel a great kinship with, but that isn’t necessarily any more of a good way to contextualize the work I’ve done than what someone with an outside perspective might come up with. I only know my intentions and inspirations. I only compare myself to myself and my own desires. I am the offspring of all who came before me, and I have no idea what comes after, or what will be influenced by me, and I wouldn’t find it useful to try to augur this.

Learn more about Reuben Radding and his work by checking out his website, following him on Instagram, and grabbing a copy of Heavenly Arms.

Joy Celine Asto Film photographer, writer, crafter, part-time traveler from Manila, Philippines. Present Editor at Whattaroll Magazine and Managing Editor at Photofocus. Former Culture & News Editor at The Phoblographer. Creator of The Zinery, Co-Founder of ZINEDICATE and Saturday Press.

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