reflexes with a gracious elegance. His knee-jerk reac-
tions on urban life are always combined with
balanced compositions transcending the contingent.
Kerte ́sz, too, unites the human-interest shot with a
certain formalistic approach and a more abstract
interest in the scene. In some of his pictures, Kerte ́sz
managed to reconcile the architectural approach of
German modern photography with an interest for
street life—a combination that characterizes some of
Walker Evans’ pictures as well.
Undoubtedly, the work of Cartier-Bresson became
the guideline for the street photography on both sides
of the Atlantic in the decades following the Second
World War. His influence permeates in the flourish-
ing photographic portraits of Paris in the 1940s and
1950s. Labelled as ‘‘the cradle of street photogra-
phy,’’ Paris had already been immortalized before
the war by photographers such as, Kerte ́sz, Lartigue,
Brassaı ̈, Eli Lotar, Germaine Krull, and Moı ̈Ver and
Cartier-Bresson himself. Shortly after the war, Paris
street life became a favorite subject of a veritable
avalanche of photo books by Robert Doisneau,
Andre ́Maurois, Izis, Cas Oorthuys, Willy Ronis, Ed
van der Elsken, and Johan Van der Keuken,
among others. Cartier-Bresson also affected the
urban photography of what Jane Livingston has
called the New York School, which she situates
between 1936 and 1963. In those years, photogra-
phers such as Sid Grossman (Chim), Alexey Brodo-
vitch, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank,
Louis Faurer, William Klein, Weegee, Ted Croner,
Saul Leiter, Leon Levinstein, David Vestal, Bruce
Davidson, Don Donaghy, Diane Arbus, and Richard
Avedon, depicted neighborhood life in both Harlem
and the Lower East Side or pictured the ‘‘random
choreography of the city’s sidewalks, the crush of
bodies on Coney Island’s beaches, the glow of street
lights, and the glare of Times Square.’’ Evoking what
architect Rem Koolhaas once called the ‘‘culture of
congestion’’ of ‘‘Manhattanism,’’ their pictures were
characterized by a peculiar photographic style influ-
enced by certain conventions of documentary jour-
nalism, such as the use of a small camera and
available light and a sense of the fleeting and the
candid. All these photographers also avowed certain
humanistic values. City life and people in their daily
environments rather than urban space were the sub-
jects of their images. Most of these photographers
took to the streets snap-shooting incidents with a 35
mm camera. Each picture was presented as the prod-
uct of a unique encounter. Responding perfectly to a
cultural climate determined by existentialism, action
painting, jazz, film noir, neorealist cinema, and the
nouvelle vague, these photographers sought to cap-
ture the hectic flux of metropolitan life. Although
clearly indebted to Cartier-Bresson, his graceful
lines and elegant compositions were often exchanged
for an almost expressionist use of dynamic and asym-
metrical compositions, tilted angles, distortions, and
disjointed elements. Lisette Model, for instance, uses
these formal structures in order to evoke a metropo-
litan hustle. In some of her pictures, the camera is
held down at the level of the pavement and the tangle
of passing feet in the crowd, as if they were taken
from the point of view of somebody being trampled
in a panic in the streets.
Compared with the depiction of Paris street life
during the same years, the street photography of the
New York School usually looks more edgy and
metropolitan. In the works of Weegee, Frank, and
Klein in particular, streets are no longer places of
friendly interactions but rather evoke a roughness
and urban alienation. Both this harshness and the
expressionist formal elements of the New York School
were further elaborated by Garry Winogrand and
Diane Arbus in the later 1960s. Winogrand’s entire
career is predicated on the abrupt configuring of
faces, gestures, and surroundings. Restlessly docu-
menting chance encounters in public space, Wino-
grand shows individuals or couples who appear
amidst the anonymous crowd but never belong to
an urban community. His quasi-instinctive way of
shooting, which resulted in casual pictures with
wide-angle lens distortions and tilted and off-center
framings, situated the urbanite in hectic but indif-
ferent surroundings. This peculiar relation between
people and the urban environment is perfectly ren-
dered in nervous and hard-edge descriptions, which
contrast with the rather smudgy style of the 1950s
that is aptly rendered in the pictures of neon lights
and glass reflections in low light and bad weather
conditions. Winogrand’s emphasis on the unguard-
ed moment is also testimony of a voyeuristic
method, which characterizes Diane Arbus’s emo-
tionally confrontational work as well. Instead of
the edgy street snapshots of Winogrand, Arbus
opted for the full-frame frontality of formal por-
traiture in order to focus on social outcasts.
The works of Winogrand and Arbus can be
interpreted as both a culmination of and the end
of the genre of street photography. The genre came
under pressure by the spatial and social transfor-
mations of the metropolis itself, which was eroded
by the processes of suburbanization and, even-
tually, disurbanization of people, industry, and
commercial activities. In the late twentieth century,
the differences between center and periphery, and
between city and countryside are no longer clearly
defined. In an age of urban sprawl the city is no
longer a place, but rather a condition. The streetsSTREET PHOTOGRAPHY