I finished A Street Photography Manifesto by Brian Lloyd Duckett with the same feeling I got after a good, hard walk: energized, slightly exposed, and quietly corrected.
Not corrected in a scolding way. Corrected in the way a strong voice reminded me what I already knew—but had started to forget.
This book didn’t read like a neutral overview. It read like a stake in the ground. A line drawn around the kind of street photography that carried weight, and the kind that merely existed because the internet needed another image today.
And I appreciated that.
Because “street photography” as a label had been stretched so far, it started meaning everything and nothing at the same time. This manifesto pushed back on that drift. It argued for standards, intention, and pictures that actually wake the viewer up.
What the book pushed back against
The book felt like it had been written in response to a modern default: safe, pretty, harmless.
The shaft-of-light photo. The person-on-a-bench photo. The “it’s on a street, so it counts” photo.
Technically fine. Emotionally neutral. Conceptually asleep.
I’d already written about how easy it was to confuse snaps with photographs—and why the difference mattered in practice, not theory. This manifesto landed like an extension of that line in the sand.
Duckett didn’t argue that ordinary life wasn’t worth photographing. He argued that the photograph still had to do something. It had to lift the ordinary into tension, humour, strangeness, friction, or surprise. In other words, the frame couldn’t just be “true.” It had to be alive.
That idea fit cleanly into the thing I’d been reinforcing in my own practice: walking wasn’t cardio. Walking was research.
Normal wasn’t enough
One of the most useful punches in the book was simple: normal wasn’t interesting—at least not on its own.
That stung in a productive way, because “normal” was what the camera saw by default. If I simply recorded what was in front of me, I came home with evidence, not photographs.
I read that section like an assignment:
- Don’t just point at life.
- Find the twist.
- Find the pressure point.
- Find the moment where reality briefly looked like it forgot what comes next.
That was the same muscle I’d been developing in my abstract street work—alignment without imitation, intent without copying.
The manifesto didn’t try to make street photography “respectable.” It tried to make it awake and alive.
Craft that protected seeing
What I liked about this book is that it didn’t hide behind philosophy. It talked about craft in a way that served the only thing that mattered: keeping attention on the street, not on the camera.
Duckett’s setup advice essentially translates to: stop fiddling. Make your decisions early, then stay present. Treat your default settings like a creative decision that protects awareness.
That aligned with how I’d been thinking about systems—how a system wasn’t the opposite of creativity; it was what kept creativity from being smothered by friction.
The book didn’t care about technical perfection for its own sake. It cared about readiness. Because hesitation kills the moment. And street moments are fragile.
28mm wasn’t a look, it was a behaviour
There was a section in the manifesto that made me smile because it basically described my life: the case for 28mm.
Not as an internet badge. Not as a “wide is cool” trend. As a commitment.
A wide field of view demanded proximity. It demanded entering scenes instead of watching them from a safe distance. It demanded a particular kind of courage. And the payoff was layered frames—context, foreground tension, background surprises.
The manifesto made the point I’d been living: the lens didn’t just change the frame—it changed the photographer.
The anti-herd message mattered more than ever
There was also a strong anti-herd streak running through the book. Duckett pushed back against the way photographers copied locations, aesthetics, and projects the moment a look became popular online.
That section mattered because “how-to culture” has trained people to outsource taste. It has trained people to shoot for approval, not truth. And it has trained people to mistake replication for mastery.
The manifesto didn’t ask for more content. It asked for more authorship.
What I took into my own practice
This was the only part that mattered: what changed after I closed the book.
- I treated defaults as a creative tool
I leaned harder into decisions made before the walk—settings and setups that protect my attention. - I ran a “normal isn’t enough” filter
Before pressing the shutter, I asked what the photograph was doing. If the answer was “nothing,” I kept walking. - I doubled down on one field of view
I treated familiarity as speed, and speed as opportunity. I let repetition build instinct. - I drew a harder line against herd-shooting
I stopped caring whether I could replicate what already worked for someone else. I cared whether the work carried my fingerprints.
The verdict
If someone wanted a soft book that told them every photograph was valid and every approach was equal, this wasn’t that.
This manifesto treated street photography like a craft with standards. It was opinionated, practical, and occasionally blunt. And that bluntness was the point: the genre didn’t need more permission—it needed more intention.
In the end, A Street Photography Manifesto didn’t make me want to take more pictures.
It made me want to make better ones.
And then it pushed me back out the door—because none of this mattered until my feet hit the pavement.