and public spaces of the city, the hunting grounds
of the street photographer, were increasingly
eroded by suburbanization, ghettoization, and so-
called urban renewal programs. From the late
1950s onwards, street photography lost its appeal
simply because streets and street life were disap-
pearing. Izis showed that in Paris, even the banks
of the Seine were given over to motorways and that
its quays became only occupied by young tourists
andclochards. Working-class people, an obligatory
motif of Paris street photography, were pushed out
to the new suburban housing projects. Cartier-
Bresson, Ronis, and Doisneau attempted to follow
their subjects to these new outer suburbs. Strik-
ingly, while their earlier street scenes of the city
had been full of interaction, in these new photo-
graphs single figures are often dwarfed by large
blocks of houses or expanses of wastelands.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, street pho-
tography also lost its symbolic power because of
the drastic transformations of the notions of com-
munity andcivitas. Especially in its so-called huma-
nist phase shortly after World War II, street
photography, both in its celebration of neighbor-
hood life and in its appraisal of the hectic rhythm
of the inner cities, had been closely connected to
the idea of a metropolitan community. Although
the modern metropolis was the breeding ground for
social atomization and the process of individualiza-
tion, intellectuals and artists presented the city as a
spatial realm embodying the colorful interaction
and democratic unity of its components. In the
last decades of the century, however, urban public
spaces have increasingly been privatized and trans-
formed into theme parks or tourist sites.
Furthermore, the increasing diversification of
the metropolitan population, the rise of a so-called
multicultural society, the development of identity
politics, and the growing importance of subcultures
and peer groups undermined the traditional
notions of civic community and public space. The
metropolis came to be presented as a key symbol
and site of the postmodern condition where Differ-
ence and the Other—other sexualities, races,
nations, and peoples—could be visualized. A series
of photographers working in the wake of Wino-
grand and Arbus during the 1970s and early 1980s
converted to making subcultural documentaries.
Marked by the breakdown of communal values,
their pictures evoke an urban landscape character-
ized by crime, fiscal crisis, racial tension, and the
faltering of the nuclear family. Utilizing the cam-
era-handlings and image constructions of Arbus,
Friedlander, and Winogrand, street photographers
such as Bruce Davidson, Larry Clark, and Nan
Goldin increasingly favored bizarre overtones and
‘‘extreme’’ subjects. Attracted to exotica and weird-
ness, these photographers joined a long tradition of
photographing minorities and social outcasts but
their interest in social enclaves and fringe scenes no
longer advanced ideas about metropolitan life in
general. According to Max Kozloff, in their pic-
tures and in those of more recent photographers of
New York street life such as Larry Fink, Jeff Mer-
melstein, Jeff Jacobson, Mary Ellen Mark, Ralph
Gibson, Alex Webb, and Sylvia Plachy,
the erstwhile and shopworn iconicity of Manhattan was
replaced by scenes of ever more local or even private
import, which no longer represented any thinking about
the city as a whole. (...) No longer a polis, the city is
regarded as a hunting ground for small incidents that
may, at any moment, speak of the cruelty, the ludicrous-
ness, or the impromptu wackiness of life.
The end of street photography in the classical
sense was not only affected by social and urban
factors. It was also accompanied by a renewed aes-
thetical and photo-theoretical awareness. Concep-
tual artists such as Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke,
and Allan Sekula denounced street photography’s
voyeurism and invented new photographic practices
to visualize the social mechanisms that determine
urban space. Street photography’s cult of the spon-
taneous and the master-eye of the photographer
were also parodied by the deskilled photography of
other conceptual artists. In the bland, amateurish
pictures of Vito Acconci and Douglas Huebler, for
instance, aleatory processes or the contingent acts of
outsiders determine the artwork.
First and foremost, however, in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, urban photography in general was
affected by a geographical shift from the inner
cities to the suburbs and peripheral areas. This
coincided with technical and aesthetic changes.
The hot, jerky snapshot aesthetic of street pho-
tography was exchanged in favor of a revaluation
of the large-view camera and its cooler, slower, and
more architectural and topographical approach
more adapted to lower density suburban areas.
The leading tendencies in the urban photography
of the last four decades—conceptual art, New
Topographics, and the new German photography
of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky,
Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Axel Hu ̈tte—
are characterized by a topographical interest or by
a predilection for spatial structures, often inspired
by a minimalist abstraction. Recent urban photo-
graphy, by consequence, dissociates itself from the
tradition of street photography that focused on the
human presence in urban space.STREET PHOTOGRAPHY