Humor in Street Photography
- Arnold Plotnick
- May 20
- 3 min read
When the City Decides to Be Funny
I’ve been a fan of street photography for years, and like most photographers, I have a list of practitioners whose work I particularly admire. One of my favorites is Elliott Erwitt, partly because he was very fond of dogs—something that appeals to me as a retired veterinarian. Another reason is his wonderful sense of humor.
Perhaps his most famous example is a photograph of a person sitting on the front steps of a building with a bulldog on their lap. The dog’s fur blends seamlessly with the person’s clothing, and its head is perfectly aligned over the person’s face, creating the appearance of a dog-human chimera. The dog’s expression is priceless.
Erwitt held humor in high regard, once saying that “making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have. And when you can make them laugh and cry, alternately, like Chaplin does, now that’s the highest of all possible achievements. I don’t know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal.”
Other street photographers whose work often incorporated humor include Martin Parr, whose images frequently derived their wit from surreal, kitschy, or ironic situations.
Another is Matt Stuart, who shoots relentlessly and has a keen eye for his surroundings, allowing him to anticipate humorous scenarios as they unfold.
Humor also softens street photography, which is often associated with grit, loneliness, or tension. While I’m certainly drawn to those elements as well, the humorous moments I occasionally capture remind me that city life is also filled with small absurdities and unexpected delights. (All remaining photos in this article were taken by me.)
Finding humorous situations to photograph is much harder than it might appear. It requires patience, luck, and above all, awareness. Humor is, by its very nature, unexpected and out of the ordinary. Street photography captures fleeting moments, and humorous situations tend to be the most fleeting of all. Life is filled with unintentionally comical moments. The photographer’s job isn’t to create the joke, but to recognize when the world briefly arranges itself into something absurd, and to be ready to pounce when it happens.
Exactly what makes something funny has always been difficult to define. Jokes tend to fall apart when they’re analyzed too closely. What one person finds hilarious, witty, or clever might leave someone else perplexed or unmoved. In my own street photographs, the humor often comes from things like impeccable timing...
clever juxtapositions....
witty signage...
or striking facial expressions.
Animals also appear frequently in my humorous images, perhaps because they provoke laughter without ever intending to. Dogs in particular seem to have a knack for inserting themselves into strange situations, often without the slightest awareness of how funny they look.
Here are some final examples of the kinds of humorous moments that occasionally present themselves if you keep your eyes open long enough. The city, it turns out, has a pretty good sense of humor.
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