The Gritty 'Streets of New York'
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, Sept. 22, 2006
Street photography can be many things, social documentary and photojournalism among them. Those disciplines' brand of occasionally dramatic, yet never less than didactic, reportage, however, is not what you'll find in the National Gallery of Art's "Streets of New York: American Photographs From the Collection, 1938-1958," a small show in which a kind of gritty lyricism takes precedence over literal depictions of life in the Big Apple.
It's a show less about facts than about emotions.
You can see it in the blur of movement in Paul Himmel's "Grand Central Station," a 1947 crowd shot that captures the dynamism of the city whose adrenaline-stoked head rush is part fear and part desire. But it's not so much the city that is the primary subject of this show's 20 photographers -- a list that includes Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Weegee and Helen Levitt, along with such lesser-known artists as Saul Leiter -- as it is the complex relationship, described by William Klein as a mixture of love and hate, between the photographer and the city. You don't see these pictures as much as you feel them.
Listen to some of the other artists, quoted in the exhibition's wall text:
Lisette Model: "Don't shoot till the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach." Sure, it suggests, as curators Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner write, that the photographer "positioned herself very close to her intended prey" (in this case a fleshy cafe singer), but it also implies that the impulse to release the shutter came not from her head but from someplace more visceral.
Bruce Davidson, who documented, and hung out with, a Brooklyn gang called the Jokers: "I felt the need to belong when I took pictures."
And Sol Libsohn: "Unless you feel an involvement with people, with the human condition, you should not photograph them at all."
Libsohn's sentiment could be the maxim for "Streets." Even a photographer like Weegee (born Usher Fellig), a tough guy known for his lurid crime scenes, was not always the cynic some assumed. "I Cried When I Took This Picture," he captions a photo of a mother and daughter watching other family members burn to death.
"Streets" is not about what New York looked like from 1938 to 1958, but about a period when street photography -- all photography, really -- moved away from certainty and toward doubt. As records of a place, many of the pictures in "Streets" are arguably flawed anyway. Take Roy DeCarava's 1953 "Hallway," a shot so dark that its details are rendered irrelevant.
Like much of the work here, DeCarava's shot of a haunted tenement is poetry, not prose. God and the devil, these photographs seem to say, are not in the details, but in the darkroom.
