cases, this approach embraces characteristics that are
similar to the topographical method. In the begin-
ning of the century, Eugene Atget, for instance, without using the privileged viewpoint of nineteenth- century architectural photographers, emptied his Paris street pictures of people and transformed the city into the silent and mysterious environment cher- ished by Surrealism. By changing the vibrant metropolis into a series of frozen images that evoke a necropolis inhabited by (blurred) ghosts, Atget appropriated the gaze of theflaneur. Eminent scholars of the modern urban condition, such as Walter Benjamin, have conceived of this character as the ultimate metropolitan. Theflaneur,afterall,is perfectly capable of playing along with the fleeting perceptions of modern urban life with its speeding traffic and circulating commodities. Instead of being a passive consumer and a mere observer or a badaud,theflaneurfaces the city as an artist. The act offlanerie, which requires a specific training of the gaze, transforms the mundane metropolis into a series of dense images. Theflaneur, in the words of the poet Baudelaire, is able to distil the eternal from the ephemeral. By translating the dynamic city into a series of visual impressions,flanerie became a perfect and perhaps excessively used metaphor for the practice of street photography. Likeflanerie, street photography presents the metropolis as both a subject and an instrument of scopophilia. Street photographers, however, do not always transform the modern vibrant metropolis into its opposite of the silent and empty dreamscape such as in the work of Atget or in Brassaı ̈’s explorations of nocturnal Paris in the 1930s. On the contrary, in the act offlanerie, many twentieth-century street pho- tographers gave shape to the colorful kaleidoscopic effects and hectic rhythms of the metropolis, which have been celebrated in both literature and the visual arts of high modernism. In doing so, street photogra- phy also answers to the intensification of nervous stimulation that an urban sociologist such as Georg Simmel thought of as typical of modern urban life. This combination of the street-level view and the evocation of urban dynamism is already apparent in the first manifestations of street photography in the nineteenth century, such as Charles Negre’s pictures
of street characters or the congested city views in
stereoscopic images. The genre of street photogra-
phy, however, only developed fully at the turn of the
century with the proliferation of hand cameras. In
the 1890s and early 1900s, artists such as Paul Mar-
tin, Heinrich Zille, George Hendrik Breitner, and
Arnold Genthe explored the streets in London, Ber-
lin, Amsterdam, and San Francisco’s Chinatown,
respectively. They were joined by rich amateurs
such as Giuseppe Primoli, Jacques Henri Lartigue,
and Alice Austen and professional firms such as
Byron in New York and Seeberger in Paris. Despite
many differences among these photographers, they
all contributed to the development of a snapshot
aesthetics that favored the spontaneous. Although
older pictorial models remained important and
sometimes staging was used, they roamed the streets
and responded to the massive amount of chance
events that are considered as typical of modern
urban life and that only could be captured by the
instantaneous. Their own impulsiveness was paral-
leled by the casualness of their subjects, who were
usually unaware of the photographer’s presence. The
street photographer is not only aflaneurbut also, in
Susan Sontag’s words, a ‘‘voyeuristic stroller’’ who
sometimesusescandidcameras.Thisdevicewould
play an important role in the history of the genre:
Arnold Genthe’s impressions of San Francisco’s
Chinatown, Ben Shahn’s use of the right-angle view-
finder in the 1930s, and Walker Evans’s subway
portraits are unmistakably some of its highlights
taken with a candid camera. In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, this voyeurism in-
volved an exploration of the hidden urban realm of
the lower classes. Photographers such as Jacob Riis
and Lewis Hine, however, managed to reconcile
inquisitiveness, often expressed by a direct confron-
tation with their subjects, with a social consciousness
that appealed to the spirit of progressivism of the
reform politics of the turn of the century. This spirit
would also dominate the photographic culture of the
New Deal, which would contribute significantly to
the development of the genre of street photography
with figures such as Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, or
Helen Levitt, and organizations such as the Farm
Security Administration and The Photo League.
Early twentieth-century street photographers cre-
ated a kind of snapshot aesthetics that was perfectly
adapted to modern city life, which modern artists
and scholars were exactly conceptualizing as a vast
amount of contingencies. Urban rhythms were
translated into a celebration of the instantaneous
and into an acceptance of unclassical framings and
a moderate motion blur. In the 1930s, these aesthetic
principles were brought to perfection by photogra-
phers working with the Leica such as Henri Cartier-
Bresson and Andre ́ Kerte ́sz. Cartier-Bresson’s
famous notion of ‘‘the decisive moment’’ answers
to an essentially modern urban condition: only the
metropolis contains such a vast amount of chance
encounters and only the modern urbanite, who has
interiorized the shock experiences of modernity, is
capable of making the necessary fast and immediate
reactions. Cartier-Bresson combined these quickSTREET PHOTOGRAPHY