We’re rich!

To see how rich, visit “Recent Acquisitions: New York Street Photography From the 1960s and 1970s” on the third floor of the New York Public Library.The 47 photographs on display there are new additions to the 400,000 or so already in the library’s collection.The photography collection is part of the larger picture collection, which includes more than 5 million items.

It’s true that, unlike the lending libraries, the New York research libraries are private institutions, but they are chartered to serve the public. I, like the rest of the public that uses them, feel a proprietary interest.The NYPL photography collection is mine, it’s yours, it’s ours. Like so many New York institutions, only superlatives can describe it.

The current exhibition includes important works by Diane Arbus, Roy Colmer, William Gedney, Joel Meyerowitz, Thomas Struth, and Garry Winogrand. If street photography – pictures taken in public places – reached an apogee of sorts in New York at mid-century, these are the artists who helped it achieve that distinction.

The street photographer, unlike a photojournalist who may also be working in a public space, takes pictures that are of interest primarily because of his talent at taking them, not because they are of intrinsically interesting subjects. Street photography is therefore likely to be more personal than news photography, and the pictures are as revealing of the people who took them as of their putative contents.

The 16 Arbus pictures were all taken at Coney Island between 1956 and 1962 when she was still shooting with her 35 mm Nikon F, discovering what it was that interested her and a way to put her signature on it. Conspicuously grainy, the prints are unlike the herded masses Weegee shot at Coney Island. Arbus picks out individuals: an almost pretty young woman on the boardwalk; a middle-aged man standing on the beach in a bathing suit, panama hat, wristwatch, socks, and shoes; a “dwarf lady” sitting onstage, casually balancing a bottle on her head. These are pleasing works, and their accessibility in the NYPL will help scholars understand the development of Arbus’s tech nique and her singular material.

Similarly, the NYPL is properly the custodian of Winogrand’s classic pictures, which are part of the heritage of all New Yorkers. “New York” (c. 1970), a picture of a young woman with voluminous curls crossing a street (I think Fifth Avenue) in Midtown, is evidence of his adoration of women; not just beauties, but all women, each for what made her feminine and unique. “New York, Saint Thomas Church in the Rain” (1968), is taken from across Fifth Avenue, a greater distance than most Winogrand pictures. Here a gusty rain has chased most people indoors,but the photographer catches a woman in a short white skirt against the backdrop of the church, struggling along the rain-swept sidewalk to get to wherever it is she is going.

Mr. Meyerowitz frequently accompanied Winogrand as he toured his concrete domain. Mr. Meyerowitz’s pictures are often witty, built on implausible only-in-New-York juxtapositions. In “Rockefeller Center” (1970), a dapper fellow in a bowler hat, wing-tip collar, and white socks (a sure sign he is English) sits on a standpipe protruding from one of the Rockefeller Center buildings; he seems oblivious to the NASA spacesuit on display in the window to his right. On a lovely Victorian arched bridge in “Central Park, NYC” (1969), a photographer with his camera on a tripod shoots two fashion models wearing woolen fall outfits while pedestrians stroll by in their shortsleeved summer wear; a young boy in a bathing suit leaps off the bridge, uninterested in the glamour behind him.

Gedney’s work is in a different key. His “Brooklyn” (1972), an elegiac study of two gasoline pumps standing with stoic dignity in an abandoned Amoco gas station, captures the sense of impending decay in the middle of John Lindsay’s mayoralty. Struth and Mr. Colmer’s pic tures are more programmatic: The former systematically shot 3,000 doors at 120 intersections between Wall Street and Fort Washington, and the latter shot large-format, highly analytic streetscapes in Midtown.

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Stephen Pinson has been curator of the library’s photography collection for a year now.A recent Harvard Ph.D. who has written extensively on art and photography, Mr. Pinson considers preservation and conservation his major responsibilities. Maintaining the physical integrity of the photographs is increasingly important, since their monetary value has increased enormously over the last few decades with the spectacular run-up in prices for photographic works in commercial galleries and auction houses. If prints are damaged, they will be impossible to replace.

Many of the prints sit in glass cabinets in the collection’s hushed main rooms, behind a locked door at the south end of the third-floor corridor of the 42nd Street building. Many are in the Salomon Room in the middle of that floor, and more are in locked stacks in cavernous underground storage spaces. Still more are in the other three research libraries – the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center in Harlem, and the Science, Industry, and Business Library at 34th Street – and yet more are scattered throughout the branch library system.

What treasures these are: extensive holdings of 19th-century topographical albums (prized now for their artistry as well as their data); sizable collections of 19th-century foreign views; prints of Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” (the Museum of the City of New York has the negatives); work from Great Depression-era WPA projects; all of Lewis Hines’s series; 40,000 duplicates of pictures taken by Farm Security Administration photographers (Ben Shann, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange, for starters) that FSA head Roy Stryker sent to the NYPL’s Romana Javitz for safekeeping; and deep holdings by members of the city’s embattled Photo League.

Mr. Pinson is trying to keep on top of the present collection while generating a new database, filling in missing items with recently donated money, expanding the online digital gallery, and preparing a major exhibition on the Photo League to open this fall.When the present show comes down, all the prints will be kept for us in the photo collection, there to be seen by lovers of photography, historians, set designers, and the idly curious. It’s our library and our collection: I never want to hear about deaccession.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until June 24 (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, 212-930-0830).