I've mentioned street photography before and the excellent iN-PUBLiC. Pedro Meyer, at zone|zero, has had a couple of excellent essays on street photography. The site uses frames so I have linked to the essays out of the frame.

Editorial 16
July, 1999
"Street Photography"
by Pedro Meyer

It used to be that up to the 80's photographing on the street and walking around with a camera was a safe practice. If you respected people's privacy and were gentle in your approach towards the subjects, more often than not, people were either glad to participate in the ritual or at worst tolerated it.

I started to notice a gradual disappearance of what traditionally was called "street photography". I could not find a suitable explanation for that until I traveled extensively throughout the United States in pursuit of fulfilling a Guggenheim Fellowship that I had received; the subject of the project was to capture street life in the United States.

Two major issues came to my attention. One was the disappearance almost everywhere of any downtown life. Those parts of the city had become populated mostly by parking lots and empty streets, with whatever was left of "life" taking place inside tall buildings. What used to be a bustling environment around commerce, had now been displaced towards the "shopping mall" located in the suburbs. "Street life" changed from being in a public -city- space to that of a private -corporate- one, the mall. The malls usually forbid one to walk around taking pictures. I was personally evicted several times for doing so without permission: I was on private property,
I was told.
[more]

Editorial 51
July, 2003
Revisiting Street Photography
by Pedro Meyer

Four years ago, this very month, I wrote on the topic of "street photography". I was disheartened then with the problems related to making images on the street. Be those in conjunction with the security of the photographer or his equipment and the shear refusal of so many people to being photographed. Many of you wrote us sharing your views on this matter, some disagreed but most of you did find equally discomforting experiences.

We also received considerable comments on the lack of interest of Galleries and Publications for this genre of photography. It also seems that the number of you making pictures on the street has reduced in numbers judging by the Portfolios section in ZoneZero, in contrast to the high numbers of the long standing tradition of "street photography" done in the past.

Out of a total of 480 Portfolios, published in ZoneZero, only 49 have images one could consider as "street photography". We have therefore decided to do something about this, by creating in the Portfolios area, an entirely new section, dedicated solely to the genre of "street photography". Something which looking back, we should have done already four years ago.
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Here are the zone|zero portfolios. Click on Street Photography.