Moments In a Pickpocket’s Paradise
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Eighty-six billion photographs will be printed this year. The ubiquity of photographic images is one of the cultural phenomena of modern times. Some people seem as intent upon recording and preserving their lives as they are in living them. Pictures are not only mnemonic devices; over time, they can become more present than the events depicted were at the time they were actually happening. Some pictures, and collections of pictures, become part of the agreed upon past for the culture as a whole. The six books in “Few Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936-66” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are that sort.
To be picked – “chosen,” in the quote from Matthew 22:14 has too specific a religious meaning for me to be comfortable using it – from the welter of available images for special consideration at the Met requires that these books be quite exceptional, and, although one of them is not a personal favorite, each is important to the history of photography in the middle of the 20th century. The six, in order of publication, are: Bill Brandt, “The English at Home” (1936); Henri Cartier-Bresson, “The Decisive Moment (1952); Robert Frank, “The Americans” (1959 in the United States); William Klein, “Life Is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels” (1956); Helen Levitt, “A Way of Seeing” (1965); and Walker Evans, “Many Are Called” (1966).
These photographers are aristocracy, not just excellent in their craft, but confident in their purposes. Each of the books is represented in the exhibition by one or more copies in a case, and half a dozen or so prints on the wall. There is a copy of the Walker Evans book – whose re-release by Yale University Press provided the occasion for the exhibition – screwed purposefully to the wall for inspection in its entirety.
The retrospective of Bill Brandt’s work last year at the Yale Center for British Art demonstrated his incredible versatility with a large display of surreal, social, documentary, landscape, portrait, and nude photographs. In “The English at Home,” he showed a Dickensian eye for the mechanics of society. Like the great 19th-century novelist, he was able to look on rich and poor alike with affectionate disinterest, and like Dickens he made details tell. The “Parlourmaid and Under-Parlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner” (1934) are treated with the same dignity as the gent in the white tie and tails riding on the running board of a taxi in “After the Theatre” (1936).
Henri Cartier-Bresson is my beau ideal, and the first thing I must say about “The Decisive Moment” is that that is not the title of his book, not anyway in its original edition in French. It was “Images a la Sauvette,” a term for illegal street trading that means something like “Images on the Fly” or “Snatched Images.” The vernacular original gives a better sense of Cartier-Bresson’s pickpocket speed and delicacy than the stasis suggested by the “decisive moment,” the English phrase that will forever be associated with his name. The prints in the exhibition are familiar and great, the cover to the French edition is by Henri Matisse. Lincoln Kirstein said Cartier-Bresson “is responsible for more individual memorable images than any other photographer in his epoch.” Some 126 are in this book.
“Many Are Called” collected 89 of the more than 600 pictures Walker Evans took surreptitiously on New York subways between 1938 and 1941. His small 35mm Contax was strapped to his chest inside the lapels of his overcoat and the shutter-release cable ran down inside its arm to his hand. The people he caught unawares were mostly working-class citizenry, both men and women wearing hats in those days, some asleep, some almost asleep, many with the blank expression New Yorkers wear on the subway that says, “I am not here.” In one picture the headline in the Daily News reads, “Pal Tells How Gungirl Killed,” and the story suggests itself in all its film-noir drama, sleazy and pathetic. The overall impression of these faces is sorrowful, as the people commuted through the Depression on their way to war.
Helen Levitt sometimes went with Evans on his expeditions underground, to keep him company and act as a decoy, but she herself is quintessentially an open-air street photographer, an artist of the sidewalks and stoops and curbs and gutters. Cement and asphalt are to her what trees and rustic streams are to John Constable. And she has enormous affection for the people of the city, especially its children, whom she comes upon as they play out tales of violence, derring-do and romance in their rough games. Like her mentor Evans’s book, “A Way of Seeing” came out several decades after the pictures were taken, and, also like Evans’s, it had an introduction – a quite wonderful one – by their friend James Agee. It established her reputation. The picture of four boys that was on the cover of the original edition suggests the range of the reactions when children are confronted by a stranger with a camera.
In “Bystander: A History of Street Photography,” the authors Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz have an extraordinary chapter about Robert Frank and the making of “The Americans.” They talk about the Guggenheim grants that enabled this immigrant from Switzerland to crisscross the country, shooting thousands of rolls of film, and the photographic and literary influences that played on him. But they also have a detailed explication of the brilliant sequence of the photographs in the book. Because it isn’t enough just to be a great photographer and take wonderful pictures, or to use fine paper and printing techniques, or to have a cogent preface. The necessary element that makes these books memorable is the way the pictures are put one after another in an order that makes grand sense.
A few of this year’s 86 billion photographs will get magnetted to refrigerator doors. Some will be placed in plastic sleeves in albums that will preserve them a while. But the majority will fade and decay in the back of drawers in the envelopes in which they were returned from the processing lab, their meaning lost to anyone who should happen upon them.
Until March 6 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).