Harry Callahan always had his eyes open. He had to have had his eyes open to find so many serendipitous photographs so unlike each other, and some so altogether unlikely he could not have set out beforehand to find them. Callahan (1912–99) was one of those rare individuals who apparently see all there is to see in any given situation, not just what they expect to see, and he leveraged odd happenstances into significant pictures. The three black-and-white photographs by him included in “City Portraits” at Deborah Bell Photographs show his great virtuosity.

The most radical example is “Bob Fine” (c. 1952). Mr. Fine is in this picture, but you have to look a bit to find him. The image is entirely black except for a narrow streak of light in the middle that starts at the top and stops two-thirds of the way down. As you study the shaft of light, you realize you are looking down an alley between two buildings. You can tell the dark on either side is a building because there are bits of fire escapes silhouetted in the light. At the bottom of that slim shaft is a small figure, presumably Bob Fine; he is too far away, and too small, to make out much about him. There is something comic in this picture; he resembles an actor on a big stage caught alone in an intense spotlight if you are seeing him from the back row of the top balcony. But it is also an intimidating image of urban isolation, of the pitiful insignificance of the human figure in the built environment. It is a uniquely Callahan image, because who else would have seen the possibility in such a dark alley, and who else would have taken such a chance with it?

Another extremely theatrical Callahan image is “Chicago, Fall” (1958). This picture also is mostly black; Callahan was a master at culling drama from darkness. (He also made a similar, though reverse, use of white in many pictures taken in the snow.) In “Chicago, Fall” a patch of light on a small segment of city sidewalk sets it off from the asphalt that takes up the bottom half of the picture and the buildings we cannot see but may assume are on its far side. A skillful photographer can manipulate the amount of contrast in his pictures, and here, as in “Bob Fine,” Callahan made what is dark pitch black, against which the small figures of pedestrians trudging anonymously along on the sidewalk are outlined in bright white. The sidewalk itself is the only area of extended gray, the lit stage on which the urban drama plays itself out.

Ms. Bell very shrewdly hung Callahan’s “Chicago” (1961) next to Garry Winogrand’s “New York” (1965), the products of two great street photographers with very different sensibilities, working the streets of two very different cities, shooting two very different women. The pictures are roughly the same size and the figures of the women are the central part of each, but there the similarities end. Winogrand (1928–84) was a girlwatcher, a man who loved the sight of female passersby, and in whose work there is frequently the suggestion of a leer. Callahan’s gaze was chaste, even in most of the extraordinary nude photographs he took of his wife: maybe especially then.

Winogrand was a tall man, and therefore he shoots the woman in “New York” from above. She has long blond hair that is blowing around her face. Her body is twisted as she walks so we see her breast in profile, and behind her two young men in business suits are watching her — or, more probably, they are watching her being photographed. Her face is in shadow, but we can see she is attractive and not happy about something, maybe about being photographed. In her left hand, she holds the handles of a shopping bag from an upscale store. I would speculate that she is in New York to pursue a career, and to enjoy its intense social life.

The woman in Callahan’s “Chicago” more likely has a job than a career. The picture is shot looking up from about knee height; maybe Callahan was using a Rolleiflex, or a similar twin-lens reflex. Shot from that angle, she is valorized like figures in Soviet propaganda posters, but she is an individual, a working-class individual. She is not a generic proletarian. She carries a functional purse, and wears a white leather jacket over a shapeless dress. Whereas Winogrand’s New Yorker appears physically vulnerable in her sleeveless sweater, the leather jacket clads Callahan’s Chicagoan like armor. Her face is seen in profile against a dark building in the background, and it is her face that is the center of attention. She has strong features — nose, mouth, chin, eyes — and Callahan gives her enormous dignity for someone who is only, after all, walking down the street.

The 26 “City Portraits” at Deborah Bell also include works by August Sander, Louis Faurer, Peter Hujar, Lisette Model — whose subjects are in one case shadows, and in another reflections — Helen Levitt, and Diane Arbus. Sander’s (1876–1964) “Secretary at West German Radio Station in Cologne” (1931) epitomizes — in the person of this one bob-haired, cigarette-smoking, stylish woman — what was best and worst about the culture of Weimar Germany. Among Faurer’s (1916–2001) six contributions is “Lexington Avenue, New York City (‘Daddy Warbucks’)” (c. 1950), featuring a well-heeled, middle-age gentleman walking with a smartly tailored, much younger woman. His daughter? Niece? Doxy? It’s New York; don’t ask.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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