Introduction

“The 60s and 70s was a time of great openness, when photography was still fairly innocent and pure, without the ambitions of today’s Art market driving the action. Photographers then made pictures out of a love for the medium, its mystery and poetry, the intimacy of the little world of photography brought us all together and though there were different methods of approach there was a genuine, mutual respect for the effort we all were making to find the ‘voice’ of the medium.”

Joel Meyerowitz

Photographs of the street are as old as photography itself. The earliest practitioners set cameras on balconies or aimed them out of windows, taking advantage of natural light to capture the life in the streets below. As cameras became smaller and more portable, photographers took them into the streets and created a type of photography—by turns casually spontaneous or carefully staged, documentary in nature or seemingly without subject—as diverse as the streets themselves. In this sense, the term “street photography,” which is now used to describe photographs taken in any public space, is as broad as the categories of landscape or portrait photography. All three genres comprise numerous artists, periods, and styles. Street photography, however, is strongly associated with the generation of photographers working in the 1960s, after Robert Frank and William Klein changed the nature of photojournalism and documentary photography. Indeed, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to state that street photography, as a conscious practice, was born in New York City in the late 1950s in the wake of Klein’s Life Is Good and Good for You in New York (1956) and Frank’s The Americans (1958).

If the documentary tradition was already difficult to define by the mid-1950s, that tradition was forever changed once Klein’s and Frank’s confrontational images of city life appeared. The decade that followed is without doubt the classic era of American street photography, and three of its most significant practitioners, all New Yorkers, are represented here: Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Joel Meyerowitz. Whereas Winogrand and Meyerowitz are closer in spirit to each other than to Arbus, all three created photographs that capture something essential about New York while revealing something personal as well. Street photographers, in general, are as concerned with imparting their own vision of the world as they are with describing the subjects they depict. They produce poems as much as documents, even while remaining attuned to the peculiarities of the medium of photography itself.

This attention to the nature of photography is more pronounced in the work of Thomas Struth and Roy Colmer, who emphasize the serial and sequential possibilities of the medium, as well as its direct and immediate representation. In their work, as in that of other artists in the 1960s and 70s, street photography becomes as much a theoretical concept as an actual practice. William Gedney’s photographs, which he conceived as the visual counterparts to his meticulously kept journals and notebooks, are perhaps somewhere in between: a way of dealing with the world outside (the street) that is at once rational and sensual, mechanical and emotive. Close in temperament to Arbus, with whom he sometimes photographed, Gedney described her after her death in 1971 as “constantly persistent in pursuit,” an apt line for all the photographers in this exhibition as they sought to render their vision of life in the street.

Stephen C. Pinson
Curator, Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs

This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach.

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