A patient photographer can often find a composition of the built landscape that isolates the central subject of the photograph—no phone lines, no signage, no traffic lights, no trees.
Sometimes that takes standing on a bench or going out into the middle of the street. At a minimum it takes circling around the scene you’re interested in like a shark that smells blood—you know there’s an angle somewhere, you just have to find it.
And sometimes you just give up. If you’re me, you often give up before you even try. Because there’s also an artifice to those perfect compositions. It’s easy to forget how crowded, how visually noisy, any given slice of an urban street scene can be.
Some of it wants to be seen: signs, warnings, advertisements. Some of it is just a spew of infrastructure that we’ve learned to look past. I had a student do a brilliant paper a few years ago in my class on counterfactual history where the point was to think about what a highly built urban environment would look like if there were no overhead power or telecommunications wires and the more I considered it, the more profound that thought was for me. It’s not hypothetical in that there have been densely built-up cities in human history that had no such visual noise, and there are some today with far less of it. But it made me think about how much I just accept a kind of dense visual chaos in cities and suburbs, where almost any framing has some long line or angular object poking into it from outside the composition.
For the counterfactual, that's essentially the monumental core of Washington DC; overhead wires were banned in the early 20th century. There is an illuminating photo of Pennsylvania Avenue--the most monumental of monumental boulevards in DC--during President McKinley's inauguration which shows the absolute tangle of wires that had sprung up before: https://www.shorpy.com/node/6557
The prohibition on wires also transformed DC's streetcar system; it ended up using underground "plows" to connect to the live wire. Some argue that the profligate use of ice-melting salt prior to President Kennedy's inauguration compounded the physical problems with the system and accelerated its demise.
The historical prohibition on wires also confounded the modern attempt to bring streetcars back, with folks who were anti-streetcar to begin with arguing that any overhead wires would interfere with the monumental vistas of L'Enfant's plan. And I don't know that anyone has really written the definitive account of exactly how and why the ban on wires came about in the first place.