By Means of a Camera

Unfamiliar Streets, Detail from cover

Flaneur, spy, celebrant, participant-observer, journalist, artist operating in the urban arena, activist, seeker for abstract form or surreal encounter—the street photographer has been all these things. Indeed, street photography’s name is somewhat a misnomer, since urban streets, and the buildings which compose them, are normally less central to this genre than the people whose passage through those streets animates them. Yet the streets and urban contexts do have their own claims to our attention and that of many of the photographers whose work is included in these two books, which present the phenomenon of street photography very differently.

Though its earliest roots lie in the Nineteenth century, street photography first achieved prominence as a genre in the middle of the of the Twentieth century. The hybrid product of a subject matter, a style and an attitude, it was characteristically energetic, life-affirming and open to the operations of chance. As celebrated photography critic Max Kozloff sagely asserts in the Foreword to The World Atlas of Street Photography, street photography is a “portmanteau term that covers a range of idioms centered on the built environment and the experience of those who perceive the human traffic around it by mean of the camera.” Traditionally, these idioms, as Kozloff calls them, have amounted to sensitivity in response to the theater of the city—to an aesthetic repurposing of the fast reaction time of the working photojournalist in response to quotidian experience.

Today, however, the genre of street photography is suddenly being energetically celebrated and redefined by scholars precisely as it is revivified by photographers. Two volumes, both from Yale University Press, address our present understanding of street photography. One surveys contemporary street photography as practiced around the globe, while the other is restricted to four carefully chosen examples of North American 20th century photography. Both volumes seek a new inclusiveness in their approaches to street photography, albeit in very different ways

The World Atlas of Street Photography surveys both the work of photographers representing their familiar home terrain and that of explorers of distant or unfamiliar realms. Street photography is thus seen to oscillate between the poles of “I know this place, let me show it to you” and “here is a new place, let me explore it for you!” Presenting this geographically organized conspectus as an “atlas” emphasizes the subject matter of the images—the real rather than the image, its style, or its place in art history. The amplitude of the volume suits the more-is-more tenor of today, when a near-infinitude of digitally available images and information is a given. Although almost any viewer would enjoy turning this book’s pages, the somewhat cluttered layout of the volume is so much like screen design that one is tempted to click on blocks of text and images, forgetting that they are ink on paper.

Higgins’ diligence in collecting 100 projects for inclusion in the Atlas results in a stimulating collection so varied that the different projects run the risk of canceling each other out. They are in fact in no sense an atlas—there are no maps included, and the images wander far from the kind of schematic overview that “atlas” suggests. Yet the more assiduously the different continents of the globe are represented, the less particularity of place remains. The work selected for inclusion is striking, but it’s so plentiful that it’s hard to determine by what criteria other work was omitted, particularly as Higgins doesn’t offer a definition of street photography. The main shared quality of the work included is a kind of quintessentially urban vitality. This reflects Max Kozloff’s somewhat over-familiar conclusion, that street photography, “as always, radiates a polymorphous openness to life.”

While Higgins’s book announces its...