Green street | Scene Through the Lens

As a photojournalist, I am trying to tell stories with my pictures. And as a newspaper photographer, most often I am supplementing stories written by my reporting colleagues and providing readers with visual content. (In the days of the Dead Tree Edition we called it “breaking up all the grey space” of print.)

I usually have a reason why I’m making a photo. I am illustrating ideas, issues, or incidents in the news.

Sometimes though, mostly between those newspaper assignments, I take pictures for no other reason than I feel like it.

I wander the streets just taking pictures of things I see. That is actually a genre of photography, called appropriately enough, Street Photography.

There are different definitions for it, but I always like what William Eggleston said: “Often people ask what I’m photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I’ve come up with is I just say: life today.”

Sometimes those two worlds of photojournalism and street photographer coincide. Like the work I’ve been doing the past few months - on an eight-block stretch of Philadelphia’s East Market Street - to visually supplement a story reported by my co-worker, Jeff Gammage.

He writes on the ongoing debate, analyses, and dreams of Market East’s potential in light of renewed attention largely driven by the Sixers’ controversial plan to build a $1.55 billion arena and apartment tower.

My assignment was literally to do street photography along the longtime hub of commerce and community, from City Hall to Independence Mall. There are more than four dozen (!) of my pictures embedded and interspersed throughout his story. Please click thru them all.

And, it was while on that assignment that I came across the three green couples from Iowa. Not part of the story, but certainly part of the serendipity of Street Photography.

The have been going to St. Patrick’s Day parades in different states for 14 years. This year they saw parades in Alexandria, Va.; Morristown, N.J.; Ireland, W. Va.; Crown Point, Ind.; and Philadelphia.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: