Paulie B for street. Behind the lens

Look at some William eggelston and Stephen shore photographs

I can’t speak for anywhere else but in New York where I live things are mostly back to normal. If you’re talking about the height of the pandemic obviously things were drastically different. But there’s effectively using distance to show what’s happening vs using gimmicks like silhouetting people on a street in rainy days. Daniel Arnold is a good example of what I mean

Great street photography should give a glimpse of the time it was taken in. What is life like in your time and place? I don’t think you can really show that by silhouetting or avoiding the people. You don’t have to be on top of people like a Bruce Gilden but even Joel Meyerowitz, who was not aggressive nor extremely close to his subjects, still shows the street and it’s inhabitants clearly. Even posed work like Jamel Shabazz’s manages to give you a view of what life was like in a given era. So no, you don’t need to be aggressively close or even candid to do great work but you do need to show what life is like. That only happens by clearly including people.