Street Photography: Jerome Berglund

Jerome Berglund

Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the Midwest where he was born and raised. His award-winning fine art photography has been shown in New York, Minneapolis, and Santa Monica galleries.

Street photography requires patience and commitment, for every divine discovery hour, days of fruitless wandering, blurry snapping, fleeting grasping must be invariably expended, set afire and sacrificed on the altar of seeking.

Street photography continues a timeless and storied legacy in the quest for beauty and meaning, capturing fleeting moments of prosaic experience and locating unexpected beauty therein, in a tradition harkening to masters of form and perspective, carrying the bright torch passed down by Maurice Prendergast, Georges Seurat, Auguste Renoir.

Street photography is a necessarily clandestine affair involving some stealth and discretion, often excelled at by the alienated outsiders inhabiting liminal margins of society like Vivian Maier, who possess keen powers of observation and acquaintance, firsthand experience occupying and commingling with different rungs of supposed social hierarchies which provides striking insights into intersectionality, informs complex understandings of injustice, cultural and institutional ills.

Street photography can be meditation, a grounding exercise in mindfulness, staying in the ephemeral moment and engaging with, meeting and appreciating the world as it is, on its own terms, exercising bottom-up modes of thinking and conceptualization.

Street photography in responsible hands is an inherently noble and potentially transformative pursuit which can concretely document history, expose flaws and instrumentally spur improvement, increase awareness and motivate critical policy changes, from peace to civil rights, reducing inequality and promoting fellowship and goodwill.

Street photography is a collaboration in multiple ways, with one's setting, community, era, and indeed with nature, the elements, and time itself, and just as we cannot step in the same river twice, the contents of each discrete frame captured will not be of the same (on this ever changing, rotating, bustling planet, existence) subject in space and time!

Street photography is a proletarian, humanitarian, egalitarian mode, showcasing the beauty of life, civilization, slices of day-to-day tableau of the public, as they mix and frenetically navigate survival's complexities against busy backdrops of our modern metropolises.

Street photography is mine, and it's also yours, his and hers, in our digital era has become accessible to nearly all at a moment's clicking, and I hope readers will remember this and each put your unique situation and perspective, opportunities and vision of this planet and period to great use, capture valuable friezes of your lives which can help inform and improve our present, endure for posterity as lasting treasured monuments to our era into the distant future!!

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Setu, December 2023