Bystander: A History Of Street Photography Colin Westerbeck [TOP]

Bystander: A History Of Street Photography Colin Westerbeck [TOP]

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In the new book Bystander, iconic photographer Joel Meyerowitz and leading photography expert Colin Westerbeck explore the development of one of the most interesting and dynamic of photographic genres, street photography.

In Bystander, the story of street photography is brought up to present day with a complete re-evaluation of historical material as well as the inclusion of contemporary photographers and a new and exclusive discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography. Available from Laurence King.

Throughout the history described in this book, there have been key periods when a group of street photographers have come together to share their work, their ideas, and in some cases a sense of social purpose. From fellowships like the Photo-Secession at the turn of the last century through the Farm Security Administration during the Depression to the group that formed around Garry Winogrand in New York in the early sixties and was influenced by Robert Frank's The Americans, street photography has often had more than just a history. It has represented a culture in the true sense of people bound to one another by common interests, beliefs, and practices. Of all these groups both formal and informal, the only one still in existence today is Magnum, the cooperative for photojournalists founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and a few others. Although current members, such as Gilles Peress, were discussed earlier, the addition of this new afterword to the original text provides an opportunity to bring the assessment of Magnum's history up to date. Magnum recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition and a book that are startling evidence of how utterly the photography by the members has changed since the organization's early days. The photographers themselves are probably not so different, but the worlds in which they both work and show their work are. It is worth taking a look at what has happened to Magnum in the last few decades because it tells us much about the recent history of street photography in general. When this book was published seven years ago, the idea of ending with the period of the late sixties and early seventies seemed a good one, since photo history had thereafter become preoccupied with other issues and a different notion of what history itself was, or should be. Except perhaps at Magnum, street photography has undergone a kind of diaspora in the last quarter century. Certainly there are many good photographers still working in this genre, and talented new ones come along all the time. The ultimate purpose of this discussion is to identify some of the best work being done today. Yet most of these photographers are working essentially alone, on the margins of both photojournalism and the art world, in a way that their immediate predecessors did not. It is by beginning with Magnum that we can best understand why this has happened. Magnum's fiftieth-anniversary exhibition that was installed in late 1999 on several floors of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris was a show devoted to the inhumanity of man to man. It was a kind of anti-\"Family of Man,\" as if it were intended to repudiate Edward Steichen's famous 1955 exhibition showcasing an earlier generation of Magnum. Michael Ignatieff feels that Steichen's show expressed the \"core belief\" of Magnum's founders. Writing in the introduction to Magnum, the book that accompanied the fiftieth-anniversary exhibition, Ignatieff makes an astute observation that the spirit in which Magnum was founded was the same in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in the aftermath of World War II. \"Magnum's task,\" Ignatieff contends, \"was providing the iconography of a liberal moral universalism\" unique to that time. Magnum's first major project in 1947 was entitled \"People Are People the World Over,\" an editorial idea e indistinguishable from Steichen's in \"The Family of Man.\" But as the new exhibition made clear, Magnum photographers now see the world as the opposite of that which the liberalism of the postwar era envisioned. The book Magnum is similarly distressing in its impact. The photographs reflect, as though in a distorting mirror, Robert Capa's dictum that if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. Whether covering a beauty pageant in Florida or a killing ground in Africa, these photographers tend to stand right in the middle of the action in a way that gives neither them nor us any perspective on the events they document. The only consistent point of view (if you can call it that) is that the world is a chaos in which hands, arms, legs, and grotesque bodies fly around the photographic frame like debris in an explosion. It is not really a point of view so much as a leveling of all human experience to a lowest common denominator. It depicts all subject matter through a very wide-angle consciousness; the human condition is smeared across the frame, even when the optics themselves are not being distorted. Perhaps because they are frustrated with their inability to make people care about the tragedies they witness, Magnum photographers tend to depict the whole world as war torn. Eugene Richards dedicated his 1994 book Americans We to Robert Frank, but in it the sadness Frank felt at American life becomes the more brittle emotion of revulsion (fig. 1). Many members of Magnum have themselves come to question the efficacy of images of murder and mayhem. A comment made by member Alex Webb is typical of such criticism: \"It is incredibly important to be a witness, but ... I sometimes wonder, well, we've seen so many pictures of dead bodies, what does it mean to society at large\";' Interestingly, one of the sharpest recent controversies within the organization involves a member who takes far less loaded pictures - Martin Parr, whose most provocative work has been straight street photography (fig 3). After Cartier-Bresson attended a 1995 Parr exhibition on world tourism, he told his young colleague, \"I ... think you are from a different planet\"; he had found Parr's work to be, he said, \"without humor, where rancor and scorn dominate, a nihilistic attitude symptomatic of society today.\" If there was a single point in time that was the watershed separating the attitudes and values of the earlier Magnum members from those of the current generation, it was a spring day in 1954 when news arrived at Magnum's offices of the death of two of the original members. One was Werner Bischof, the first photographer whom the founders had invited to join. A vehicle in which he was riding had crashed in the Andes. The other was Robert Capa, who had stepped on an antipersonnel mine outside the village of Thanh Ne, Vietnam, thereby becoming the first American correspondent to die in Indochina. Though no one could have recognized it at the time, the almost simultaneous deaths of Bischof and Capa provided a coda for the era of liberal universalism that had been Magnum's founding faith. Capa's death was a singularly telling-or rather, foretelling-event. Earlier on the day that he was killed, the Viet Minh had ambushed the French armored column in which he was traveling on a road bordered by rice paddies. To Capa's amazement, the peasants tending these paddies just went on with their work while the firefight raged around them. This was the first time he had been directly involved in the kind of war of liberation that was to characterize the later twentieth century, and it killed him. With him died, one might say, many humanitarian ideals that had emerged from the world war in which he had made his reputation and that had shaped Magnum. The subtitle that Russell Miller gave to his recent book on Magnum is Fifty Years at the Front Line of History. It would be a decade after Capa's death before the rest of us became familiar with the sort of situation in which he died and with the disturbing questions implicit in it about - War and everyday life-war as everyday life. If you have the street photographer's passion for incongruities, this new kind of war presents you with great photo ops. The surrealism Capa witnessed as peasants went on with their daily chores while gunfire erupted in their midst is the same that Philip Jones Griffiths responded to a couple of decades later when he photographed a woman in Northern Ireland mowing her lawn as a black British tommy crouched, rifle at the ready, under cover of a bush in her yard (page 404). Obviously, clever ironies like these are not appropriate when a photograph's subject is an atrocity. But beyond even that concern lies a still larger problem of whether such wittiness works at all in a society that has become as divisive and self-critical as ours. It is not just a historical coincidence that no new culture of street photography has arisen since the seventies comparable to the FSA, Magnum, or the group that hung out together in New York in the early 1960s. That was the last moment at which the liberal consensus of the postwar period was still intact. Since then, both photojournalism and the art world have had a far more adversarial relationship to the society that is their audience. You don't have to accept uncritically the sentimentalism of \"The Family of Man\" in order to agree that without genuine assent to the ideals it was popularizing, the celebration of life found in most street photography becomes difficult to sustain. Already in the work of Robert Frank, William Klein, or Garry Winogrand, as different as their sensibilities are, there is an edginess, a degree of alienation from both their subjects and their viewers. In the work of many current Magnum members, from James Nachtwey to Martin Parr, alienation is sometimes carried to insupportable lengths. The street photographer becomes a man without a country, a rogue talent. Perhaps the most stringent 1950s review of \"The Family of Man\" was written by Roland Barthes, whose criticism would later transform th