In order to understand the history of street photography, it is vital to know what street photography is. Street photography is a discipline that captures everyday life in a candid manner as the subjects are strangers without knowledge of being photographed. This unawareness allows the photographer to capture and the public to see the photographed world as not being staged for camera, but seeing it in a natural way that many do not notice or take for granted.
The earliest periods of street photography coincide with the origins of photography itself. Due to the urbanization of the late 19th Century, many early photographers attempted to capture the lives of those living in these cities, so quite literally they took pictures in the streets for the birth of street photography. Earliest forms of photograph technology required long periods of time for the taking of the pictures, so street photography is a form that can have people in the image or simply photograph the location. Both people and architecture in location can present the world naturally.