Nevertheless, the posturban landscape as well has
been portrayed in some form of street photography.
However, its most interesting examples are not nos-
talgic attempts at restoring an old tradition. On the
contrary, one can speak of a certain subversion of
the genre from within. Many urban photographers
in the 1980s and 1990s portray people in their urban
surroundings but brush aside other essential charac-
teristics of the genre. Their pictures do not show
chance encounters or spontaneous events. There is
no evocation of the candid or the fleeting impres-
sions of metropolitan life. Instead, a large amount of
recent street photography seems to have adopted the
stasis of the large format topographical urban
photography. Photographers such as Joel Sternfeld,
Richard Renaldi, Francesco Jodice, Shizuka Yoko-
mizo, or Jitka Hanzlova show characters in their
everyday urban surroundings while posing or con-
sciously looking into the camera. In the works of
artists such as Francis Aly ̈s, Florian Schwinge, or
Erwin Wurm, human subjects are almost trans-
formed into living sculptures. Late twentieth-century
street photography even involved a revival of staging
and (digital) image processing. A case in point is the
work of Jeff Wall, who integrates artificially con-
jured tableaux in location shots and combines mod-
ern techniques and aesthetic options with the
formulas of traditional genre painting. Thus, street
life’s spontaneity and contingency turn out to be
stage-managed and digitally processed. Something
of Wall’s mysterious and emblematic content
comes through in Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s so-called
Streetworksas well. Although these pictures are not
staged, they cannot be said to have much in common
with Klein’s or Winogrand’s work. Instead of a
small Leica, he operates a large-format camera and
a whole armory of powerful lights that catch his
streetwalkers off-guard. The touch of arbitrariness
is immediately checked by strong theatrical lights
(activated by the pedestrians themselves by setting
off a sensor) that transform each picture into a
histrionic act. Similar staging practices or compar-
able strategies of image manipulation can be found
in the works of Nikki S. Lee, Hannah Starkey,
Vale ́ry Jouve, Suzanne Lafont, or Beat Streuli, who
all turn street photography into a simulacrum that
only stages the spontaneous and contingent quality
of street life. Their pictures appear to indicate that
the spontaneity of the core city’s neighborhoods, as
evoked and idealized by urban critics such as Jane
Jacobs in the early 1960s, has long been suppressed
by a logic that tailors public space principally to a
logic of consumption or transforms it into a theme
park, an open-air museum, or a tourist attraction.
Wall, diCorcia, and many other ‘‘anti-street photo-
graphers’’ stage street life in a way that responds
very closely to how urban space itself has been to
some extent converted into a simulacrum.
StevenJacobs
Seealso:Arbus, Diane; Atget, Euge`ne; Becher, Bernd
and Hilla; Brassaı ̈; Camera: 35 mm; Cartier-Bresson,
Henri; Clark, Larry; Davidson, Bruce; diCorcia, Phi-
lip-Lorca; Documentary Photography; Doisneau,
Robert; Ethics and Photography; Evans, Walker;
Farm Security Administration; Faurer, Louis; Frank,Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street, Spanish Harlem, New
York City, 1996.
[#Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos]
Lee Friedlander, Father Duffy, Times Square, New York,
New York, 1974.
[Re ́union des Muse ́es Nationaux/Art Resource, New York]STREET PHOTOGRAPHY