Each year, we publish hundreds of street and documentary photographs in Street Photography Magazine. Some hit right away. Others stick with us long after we’ve closed the issue.
In this episode, Ashley and I look back at 2025 and share 10 images (plus a few others) we keep coming back to. These are a few of the photographs that held our attention, raised questions, or felt worth spending more time with.
Below, you’ll find each image with our thoughts on what drew us to it, along with the full audio conversation.
Ashley’s Selections
France Leclerc Untitled
This photo is immediately surprising (unless you deal in camels probably). But what I love is the tension in this photo. Don’t anybody psychoanalyze me, but it reminds me of an ugly divorce, two men fighting, a camel, distressed dangling in the middle, other camels nearby gawking. It’s tense, but the camels make it almost comical.
So many of Billy’s photos leave me slack jawed, thinking “how did he even see that?” This is one of them. It’s like the magic of street photography wrapped up into a single image. Things familiar, things unfamiliar, gorgeous light, and PERFECT timing.
This photo takes that “multiple layers” approach we see a lot in street photography and makes it better. Not only are the subjects layered well, there’s just so many emotions going on here. Amazing capture. I really admire Andrew’s observation skills. He’s super skilled at seeing emotions and capturing them at just the right second.
I talked about this one on The Crit House, but besides it being a lovely photo, I love the way Dean captures his adolescent siblings in the presence of his father, with his dad always in the periphery – you never see his face, but he’s often there on the edges. It’s that moment in life where you’re aching for independence, planning out your life without your parents, but you still desperately need them, in a picture. You don’t see this phase of life documented through photography very often, which I think makes it super valuable.
This is just so weird. And I love weird stuff. It’s a photo of the remains of Presidents Park, where forty-two monumental busts of the nation’s presidents were constructed to draw in tourists visiting nearby Colonial Williamsburg. The park didn’t work out and the busts have been dumped in a field and left to decay. It’s weird but it’s so easy to find metaphors for government and society in these photos. That makes it more meaningful than just snapshots of a random oddity.
Although this is actually a documentary photo, I chose it due to the intimate story Dean tells us about his youngest sibling, Victoria as he makes a candid image of her having a quiet moment in her bedroom. The warm tones reveal a feeling of closeness between the siblings while the multiple mirror reflections pull the viewer deeper into the frame to reveal her melancholy mood.
I’m attracted by the shapes, particularly triangles. I also like that it is not a typical “street” image. The combination of shapes creates an abstract whole. Alaya has arranged the elements so the compositional relationships become more important than the literal subject matter. The image functions almost like an abstract painting that happens to use real-world elements.
Pat Callahan made this photo with his iPhone which brings to mind the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The parallel diagonal lines of the bannisters create a sense of depth and movement, which pulls the eye down and around the corner where to the nuns.
Hillary Greene-Pae “Little Joe Mclerran and Family at the Cat Head, Clarksdale, Mississippi”
I was first drawn in by the image of the father watching over his son stretching his small fingers to make a difficult cord as his daughter dances to the music. Hillary’s choice of a slow shutter speed perfectly captures the motion of the girl’s dress. Then while spending more time in the image I noticed the painting of the singer above the group in the background as if he’s part of the performance. This scene of a family doing something they love together made me wish I was there.
At first I almost passed on this photo due to the foggy nature of the plastic curtain. Then, after pausing for a closer look I was drawn in by the impressionistic texture created by the semi-opaque curtain. The Sticky Fingers logo from the Rolling Stones album in the upper left hand corner of the frame gives to overall image balance that would not exist in its absence. The muted tones mirror the sense of peace of the resting man in the center of the frame.
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