Since tomorrow is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the most famous photograph ever taken on the streets of New York, it would be a good time to explore the history of that art. I have a few examples of my own in this diary from a day this spring, when I began exploring street photography as a past time.
From that spring morning I had already posted the photo diary Yesterday's Memorial for the Triangle Factory Fire Victims and because of a comment made in one of my slightly silly diaries I needed to go back and see the Lower East Side again. Walking from Greenwich Village to Katz's Deli, thinking more Edward Hopper because I had just left his old neighborhood, the weather improved and I snapped a few shots. Teacherken was right, the best corn beef sandwich going and I saw a few other things too.
As I walked I began thinking about the many impressions I've collected in my head, the photographers that have walked those streets before me. Below the fold are some of my street photos from that spring day but first probably far too many thoughts about the history of street photography in NYC.
I've posted many photos here at DailyKos, some political but most have been of city parks, flowers, animals in the zoo and many documentations of the coming twilight.
"Blue Hour" 1983
by Joel Meyerowitz.
The photos I rarely post here, attempts at capturing the everyday dramas of the streets of New York are the photographs I most cherish. These photos that are called street photography, a momentary interaction with someone other than Lindsay Lohan have become my passion. Street photography is a style that offers both the spontaneity of capturing a moment that will never be repeated and a little of the excitement of that "Pepping Tom" moment.
"A penny for your thoughts?"
The death in June of Edith Shain also pointed to that most famous of New York City street photographs. Today New York City celebrates the sixty-fifth birthday of Alfred Eisenstaed's Life Magazine cover photo of the V-J Day celebrations by placing a twenty-six foot tall statue of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. The statue called "Unconditional Surrender" to celebrate the photo called "V-J Day in Times Square" will be on display through Monday.
But it would seem that this celebration of Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation" that stands high above the pedestrians this weekend is the exception not the rule in New York City street photography. New York City has a personality and it has been documented for many years, that Edward Hopper face. In the long history of great photographers capturing New Yorkers and certainly in present day street photography we may have been stereotyped as being moody, depressed or at least having a lot on our mind. Street photography can be a celebratory kiss but it can be many other things too.
Street photography uses the techniques of straight photography in that it shows a pure vision of something, like holding up a mirror to society. Street photography often tends to be ironic and can be distanced from its subject matter, and often concentrates on a single human moment, caught at a decisive or poignant moment. On the other hand, much street photography takes the opposite approach and provides a very literal and extremely personal rendering of the subject matter, giving the audience a more visceral experience of walks of life they might only be passingly familiar with. In the 20th century, street photographers have provided an exemplary and detailed record of street culture in Europe and North America, and elsewhere to a somewhat lesser extent.
Notice that phrase "straight photography," a photo style choice about reality and objectivity that denounced manipulation. "Straight photography" has a certain appeal to the progressive and none whatsoever to conservatives. One of the best things about studying past photographers in order to become a decent street photographer are the teachers I have to learn from. Just try and come up with a conservative photographer of note. There is some mention of photos by
Barry Goldwater but outside of that the list of Republican with photos that appeal to people outside of their immediate family is short. Street photography is about reality.
An enormous collection on New York City street photos that is really worth a look shows both a fascinating chronology of a city that seems to embrace rapid change and the fact that New York City street photography has long been a method of social reform. But who deserves the credit for inspiring generations of progressive photographers?
"Pike and Henry Lower East Side"
by Berenice Abbott
Better New York City street photography needs a little French flavor, just a touch of
Alexis de Tocqueville to make it interesting. For the modern photography version of these
"instant drawings" top billing seems to go to
Henri Cartier-Bresson who "
prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve life in the act of living." As a young man Henri Cartier-Bresson was originally inspired by the photography of
Martin Munkácsi and became famous for taking the photo at just the right moment to capture the whimsy of modern life in the oldest city in France, Marseille. He would go on to define
"Images à la Sauvette."
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great French photographer was also a New York City street photographer.
Of course while Henri Cartier-Bresson may have captured the Twentieth Century he was not really the father of street photography. Because of the amount of light necessary to freeze an image in the early days of photography, photographs from the street are almost as old as as the camera.
The original photographer to set a tone for New York street photography was probably the great Danish American social reformer Jacob Riis. Famous for not just the photo book titled "How the Other Half Lives" and the very haunting photograph Bandit's Roost, Jacob Riis even deserves some credit for clean drinking water, decent housing and city parks.
"Bandit's Roost, 59 ½ Mulberry Street"
by Jacob Riis
Today Jacob Riis
is remembered as a campaigner against slum housing.
Imagine it's 1888. New York City. The Lower East Side is the most densely populated place on Earth: Block after block of tenements house the working-poor immigrants of the city, including Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, Czechs and Chinese.
Imagine the darkness of an unlit corridor in one of those tenements, a corridor that opens onto windowless rooms, 10 feet square, where entire families live and might even work — sewing, or rolling cigars.
Out of the darkness, a door opens. A man with a Danish accent leads a team of amateur photographers, who are accompanied by a policeman. They position their camera on a tripod and ignite a mixture of magnesium and potassium chlorate powder. A flash explodes, illuminating their squalor.
Five Cents a Spot
by Jacob Riis
The end of the Civil War unleashed a rapid acceleration in the trends of industrialization and urbanization, and provided a cadre of reformers who had been working in health and sanitation commissions during the war.
By the '80s, the difficulty lay with providing persuasive evidence of the dire conditions in cities and factories, in order to persuade citizens and those with money, power and influence, that it was time to pressure government to regulate and improve conditions.
At first the emphasis wasn't on government, but upon private and voluntary reform-- pressure put on factories and their owners, on landlords and their families, on financiers and speculators, by religious leaders, neighbors, citizens and social organizations.
Jacob Riis came out of this volunteerist movement, but he came during his career-- 1880-1910, roughly-- to a shifted position, arguing for steadily increasing government engagement to regulate, and to punish, the forces of environmental, social, and economic exploitation.
Quite a legacy that inspired not just politicians and photographers.
The work of Riis inspired Lincoln Steffens, the man considered to be the "godfather" of investigative journalism. "He (Riis) not only got the news; he cared about the news. He hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries, and he fought them. He was a terror to the officials and landlords responsible, as he saw it, for the desperate condition of the tenements where the poor lived. He had exposed them in articles, books, and public speeches, and with results. All the philanthropists in town knew and backed Riis, who was able then, as a reformer and a reporter, too, to force the appointment of a Tenement House Commission that he gently led and fiercely drove to an investigation and a report which - followed up by this terrible reporter-resulted in the wiping out of whole blocks of rookeries, the making of small parks, and the regulation of the tenements."
Over one hundred years later it would seem, at least in the early New York City photographs that museum curators present, there was a little Jacob Riis in every photographer. Either the struggles of the working class and the poor dominated New York photography or those photos were deemed worth preserving.
Alfred Stieglitz who devoted his life to elevating photography from a pastime to a form of art often focused on
the toil of New York living.
"The Terminal" 1892
by Alfred Stieglitz
The dedication to using photography as a method of helping the impoverished and forcing social reform through documentary photography expanded greatly in New York City, first through the Dutch sensibilities found in the
The Photo-Secession and continued through many New York City schools of photography. Not all the participants at
"291" and members of
The Camera Club were interested in social reform but
Lewis Hine would earn credit as the father of American social documentary photography using his camera to
first address anti immigrant sentiment and later
child labor reform.
The Roaring Twenties would become the Glamor Daze of photography. Many of the pioneering artist would find high paying jobs to supplement their art because people thought that cameras could not lie and photographs began replacing drawings in advertising. It didn't even start then because the first decade of the twentieth century had a Lindsy Lohan too but during the Roaring Twenties many Americans would use the photos of the stars to explore a fantasy intimate relationship with the image. Babe Ruth would become the first person to make a million dollars from his own image and at the early passing of "The Latin Lover" over a million Americans would morn the loss of Rudolph Valentino with his photograph.
The first U.S. daily printed in tabloid form founded in 1919 would become "New York's Picture Newspaper" in 1920. Because of that paper with New York commuters finding the tabloid form easier to read on the subway human interest photography would attain mass market appeal. Meanwhile Lewis Hine changed his focus to the American working class in order to raise the dignity of American labor.
"Powerhouse Mechanic Working on a Steam Pump" 1920
by Lewis Hine.
A student of both Stieglitz and Hine, Paul Strand also worked to raise social conscious. "Like Lewis Hine, Strand was collecting the poignant evidence of poverty among the cultures that crowded the metropolis." Strand felt that he could "get a quality of being through the fact that the person did not know he was being photographed" and created a camera with a false lens to distract attention as he captured the real face of what was then called "The Five Points." Paul Strand would also spend 1935 as a mentor to Henri Cartier Bresson having some influence on the editorial photography of that great master.
Also following in the footsteps of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Paul Strand Arnold Eagle would pick up where they left off with a chronicle the Bowery.
"We were really recorders of history, and we were also trying to make people aware of the problems that existed."
If there was a Great Depression going on in the 1930's you would never know it from the history of photography. Just a few years before
going right-wing bananas and inspiring
the neocon facade, Henry Luce purchased
Life Magazine in 1936.
The early days of these covers are still breathtaking. Luce created a weekly news magazine with a
strong emphasis on photojournalism.
The format of Life in 1936 was an instant classic: the text was condensed into captions for 50 pages of pictures. The magazine was printed on heavily coated paper that cost readers only a dime. The magazine’s circulation skyrocketed beyond the company’s predictions, going from 380,000 copies of the first issue to more than one million a week four months later.
Meanwhile down on the streets
Sol Libsohn and
Sid Grossman founded
The Photo League. With origins in the worker's photography movement Paul Strand would also become one of the founding members of this social issues photography cooperative. Like the
Camera Club of New York that made history for accepting Miss Elizabeth A. Slade as a member in 1887, the Photo League was no Boy's Club.
Margaret Bourke-White who was born in the Bronx and the person who took the photo for that first Life magazine was a member.
Lisette Model who would have an enormous influence on photographers was a member. Two of the greatest New York City street photographers were too, first
Berenice Abbott and later
Helen Levitt.
The 30's was an era of New Deal cultural programs where good government supported both photographers and social issues. The Works Progress Administration made possible the publication of "Changing New York" by Berenice Abbott. A Hoboken native with a New York City education in photography Dorothea Lange through the support of the Farm Security Administration "humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography." Another who documenting the effects of the Great Depression with the support of the FSA,Walker Evans revolutionized straight photography with photos that he wanted to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." He would be given credit for an unprecedented study of American culture and would eventually ride the New York City subway system with a concealed camera, that's street photography too.
In New York's Golden Age, the 1940's, street photography as a tool of social reform did not die. Government support had naturally switched from social reform to support for European allies and later increasing the moral of both Rosie the Riveter and the American solider. Many of the great New York photographers would go off to war including Margaret Bourke-White the first female war correspondent. A few stayed home. Little known photographers like Vivian Cherry continued the legacy. Far more famous Arthur Leipzig who also had roots in the Photo League would begin to capture the image of the streets of New York. Before going Hollywood the style and character of Weegee the Famous made the transition from the 30's to the 40's as a very influential New York street photographer. It was also the best days of Helen Levitt who rarely gets but so deserves credit for her photos being intended as a social documentation of the times.
It was the 1950's when photography as a tool for social reform was driven to outsider art and identified with the Beat Generation. With people like Henry Luce who believed that "freedom of the press belonged to the man who owned one" in power, a more perfect America was presented to the public. It could have been LOOK magazine, a predecessor to the TMZ stupidity that passes for issue oriented photography today. In an interview with Ron Galella, Leonard Lopate gave some credit to the scandalous relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher in trying to explain the public's view of newsworthy becoming a peek in to the bedrooms of the stars. Or perhaps something that started as long ago as Evelyn Nesbit was pushed by a media with an agenda. For media tycoons like Henry Luce since everything needed to be perfect at home in order to police the rest of the world "LIFE" became a bowl of cherries.
It could have been the transition from WPA photographers to McCarthyism with a war in between that suppressed social issues. Whatever it was the most inspirational cooperative of New York photographers ended.
In 1947 the League was formally declared subversive and placed on the U.S. Department of Justice blacklist by Attorney General Tom C. Clark. At first the League fought back and mounted an impressive This Is the Photo League exhibition (in 1948), but after its member and long-time FBI informer Angela Calomiris had testified in May 1949 that the League was a front organization for the Communist Party, the Photo League was finished. Recruitment dried up and old members left, including one of its founders and former president, Paul Strand, as well as Louis Stettner. The League was forced to disband in 1951.
It had been the goal of Alfred Stieglitz that photography become an art form and by the 1950's his goals had been met. In 1955, fifteen years after Department of Photography was founded at the Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition that can still be seen in Clervaux would be a turning point. As a presentation of the people of the world living and working in the 1950's the sociological value of photography became well established beyond artistic circles.
During an era when the employers of photojournalist presented a happy America art began capturing the life and culture of city streets. At this time the genius of Diane Arbus would become established, forever influencing both art and street photography. Two great street photographers would also mark the transition from studies of the impoverished to the study of a growing middle class. The working public wanted to be acknowledged with both Robert Frank and William Klein capturing some compelling images of how we struggle to carve out our place in an increasingly anonymous world. It was not that new but in that "fifteen minutes of fame" sense, what present street photography would become.
During my childhood in the early 1960's I would never hear of these great photographers. Fact is that today when asking many of my fellow New Yorkers who Jacob Riis was I'll get an answer like "Some rich guy who had a nude beach named after him." I was young and it was the days of "Camolot" as I began getting impressions of the world first through the photos of national magazines and local newspapers. I got the impression that everything in America was perfect except for my hometown and someplace called Appalachia. Soon there was the image of John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin, Detroit and nearby Newark going up in flames, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King followed by Robert Kennedy, little girls running in flames in Vietnam and the Kent State massacre for photos in national magazines but during my early years, outside of the local newspapers, very misleading. Perhaps all local newspapers were presenting more reality that those Henry Luce publications, I don't know because I was only thumbing through New York City newspapers but I like to think that the legacy of Jacob Riis lived on in the New York press.
From a very early age it was not a photographer who created my visual desire to explore the texture and tonality of my city but a great American painter. I have a clear recollection of the first time Edward Hopper influenced me. It was in my second grade art class when Mrs. Dunn passed out a print of Early Sunday Morning for all the students to glue into their art books. There are only two prints I can remember gluing into that book, Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh and Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning. A few years later, perhaps the same year that Edward Hopper died, that same Early Sunday Morning was placed on the cover of the Bronx telephone book. Once again I was haunted by my inquiry "Who is behind those windows" and probably the only sentence I can remember from second grade, my art teacher explaining that "Edward Hopper doesn't tell you a story but allows you to fill in the blanks."
And this brings me to my spring day induced by a teacherken comment in a silly diary called "You Don't Have to be Jewish..." As I walked thinking of the Edward Hopper influence I felt I was walking with his schooling because there is just something magical about the New Yorkers of Edward Hopper. I soon realized there was a little bit of Jacob Riis in Edward Hopper's subjects. There's a little bit of Honoré Daumier's "Third Class Carriage" in Walker Evans' subway passengers and that long time favorite NYC photo of mine by Bruce Davidson that I've always chalked up to Edward Hopper, there is a little bit of everyone in that picture.
I didn't have to walk far to realize on that first day I began exploring street photography that it is not who you take the picture of that matters but who you take the picture with. I was walking with the ghost of Diane Arbus, the whimsy of Helen Levitt and the wisdom of Walker Evans.
"Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."
My photos don't amount to much. Just some memories of a day where perhaps you will see more that I did. Memories that someday will be discarded by some surviving relative but I have the privilege of posting them here, these photos that I took to remember all of the great New York photographers.
Here's a little Orchid Street culture shock.
Just one deserted hint of the rundown bustling marketplace that I once knew as Orchid Street could be found.
As I walked on the Lower East Side on the fine spring day I got a nice welcome.
One of my favorite limitations of photography is reality. New York City cannot be represented with the grimy grit of John Sloan or the clean purity of Edward Hopper. A few adjustments can be made but what you see is what you get.
That is a rather famous bar on Tompkins Square Park and Avenue B. Perhaps you remember it from 'Crocodile' Dundee.
There can be a little Edward Hooper mystery in any street photo.
Or you can just stare into a doorway but try and keep your fingers out of the shot.
Wait at a bus stop and what do you see?
Find an interesting setting.
And wait for an unlikely couple.
Find a person that relates to their environment.
Or persons that relate to the times, mid afternoon a young man playing and older out of work men lined up on park benches networking on their Blackberries.
Capturing people relating to each other on the city streets.
Here's a street photography fail. Don't wave to people before taking the photo. Then it is a snapshot.
Here's a changing times photo. Like architecture, art is ephemeral in New York. Thecommunity garden sculpture tower made famous by the "NYPD Blue" opening credits and also copied on the stage of "RENT" like the man who made it is now gone. The garden has survived.
Now this secret garden might become like Eddie Boros, just a memory. The protections for Community Gardeners that Eliot Spitzer protected from Rudolph Giuliani are about to expire. Community gardeners are very nervous.
If you want to pursue street photography, living in New York makes it easy.
Find something uniquely New York like a bicycle warmer.
Or a storefront that is not like everything else.
Just add people to make store fronts more interesting.
Even a simple study of perspective is captivating.
But capturing a moment, that's special.
The open air of Delancey Street.
And the end of the line, the bridge to Brooklyn.
But of course there's Katz's. Can you read the sign? "Where Harry Met Sally. Hope you had what she had! Enjoy!"
Don't forget your ticket.
This was my favorite photo of the day because of the interaction with the man in the photo. After snapping a shot outside of the best pastrami on the planet I muttered under my breath "Shit." He said "I'm sorry" thinking I was upset because he got in the shot. After I explained I was actually upset because I had cut off the puppy's feet, he modeled for a few more shots.
I hate to repeat a composition but I promised this man I would post his picture here. After taking the photo he walked across the street and anxiously asked "Will it be published somewhere? Another advantage to New York street photography, eight million exhibitionist.
And for a parting shot, the walk back through Greenwich Village to the subway, St. Mark's Place in spring glory.
In closing I've been thinking about Meteor Blades call for offering what we are doing now. Sadly in my case the answer is "Nothing." I just don't have the political energy I once had but I have a few "people powered politics" experiences under my belt. One of them was volunteering at the Wards Island homeless shelter for men.
I would love to go back there someday and do a Jacob Riis style diary here about the things I saw. Men who had been working their way back from problems overcome, placing the legs from the foot of the bed over each shoe so it would not be stolen while they sleep. Men who were kicked off the island in the morning to go find a job, coming back in the evening hoping for a cot. Men who just could not get ahead and could not get resources from an exhausted welfare system. Men who had two years of NA or AA under their belt with debts paid and almost enough saved for that first month and a month's security. It so reminded of the Police housing that Jacob Riis worked so hard to close. I could post some stories of human struggle and the joy these people feel when they move on to some fleabag SRO. I could go back there if I had the energy.
But these are just memories and this diary is in memory of someone who got it. In pioneering both the photograph and flash powder as a tool of progress, Jacob Riis devoted his life not the new "progress is glacial" sort of reform but in your face "this is what you are trying to ignore" writing and photographs. A short video of his work offers the thought "Historians believe Riis was more interested in galvanizing public opinion than lobbying legislators." But Jacob Riis was both comfortable perfecting the art of muckraking and addressing the rich and powerful for assistance in his cause. Lobbying was also an important factor or at least a very productive friendship was. Riis would become friends with Theodore Roosevelt when Roosevelt was the Police Commissioner of New York City. They walked the police beat on the streets together investigating the darkest corners of the city. When Roosevelt became governor he closed down the police lodging houses. They became lifelong friends and in his autobiography Roosevelt would write "... Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted to call the best American I ever knew..." In American ideals, and other essays, social and political, Volume 4, Roosevelt began his tribute to Jacob Riis with;
Recently a man, well qualified to pass judgment, alluded to Mr. Jacob A. Riis as "the most useful citizen of New York". Those fellow citizens of Mr. Riis who best know his work will be most apt to agree with this statement. The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent ever encountered by them in New York City.
That man should be an inspiration to all of us. The best part is that now in this era where the media no longer has that authoritarian hold we can all do those things. Isn't that the best sign of progress? Everyone of us have become citizen reporters and each of us can make the difference. Cheers.