Street photography emerged in the late 19th century and has evolved over time. Early pioneers like Atget, Steichen, and Struss captured candid street scenes in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The genre grew in the mid-20th century with photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Klein, and Winogrand capturing candid moments in public. In the late 20th century, the genre further developed with photographers like Friedlander, Meyerowitz, Wearing, and diCorcia exploring candid photography and its relationship to portraiture and identity. Street photography has documented social changes over decades and provided candid insights into public life.

1. Street Photography
a brief history

2. “Street photographs have an imaginative life all their own, one that
seems sometimes quite independent of whatever intentions the
photographer might have had…”
From Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin
Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz

3. Edgar Degas
Place de la Concorde
1875

4. Charles Marville
Rue Tirechappe
Negatibe about 1860

5. Eugene Atget
Rag picker
1899-1900

6. "The charm of Atget lies not in the mastery of the plates
and papers of his time, nor in the quaintness of
costume, architecture and humanity as revealed in his
pictures, but in his equitable and intimate point of view.
. . . His work is a simple revelation of the simplest
aspects of his environment. There is no superimposed
symbolic motive, no tortured application of design, no
intellectual axe to grind. The Atget prints are direct and
emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle
perception, and represent perhaps the earliest
expression of true photographic art."
Ansel Adams

7. Eugene Atget
Rue du Maure
c. 1908

8. Eugene Atget
91, rue de Turenne
1911

9. Edward Steichen
The Flatiron
1905

10. Karl Struss
Columbus Day Parade
c. 1912

11. Jacques-Henri Lartigue
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris
1911

12. Jacques-Henri Lartigue
Car Trip, Papa at 80 kilometres an hour
1913

13. Andre Kertesz
Montmartre
1927

14. Andre Kertesz
Meudon, Paris
1928

15. Alexander Rodchenko
Gathering for the demonstration
in the courtyard of the VChUTEMAS
(Higher Institute of Technics and Art)
1928

16. Walker Evans
City Lunch Counter
1929

17. Walker Evans
Girl in Fulton Street
New York, 1929

18. Walker Evans
Parked Car, Small Town, Main Street, 1932
Ossining, New York

19. Brassai (Gyula Halasz)
Open Gutter
From "Paris by Night"
1933

20. Berenice Abbott
Bread Store, 259 Bleecker Street
c. 1935-39

21. Berenice Abbott
El at Columbus Avenue and Broadway
c. 1935-39

22. Bill Brandt
Window in Osborn Street
1931-35

23. Bill Brandt
East End girl, doing the Lambeth
Walk
c. 1936

24. Henri Cartier-Bresson
(Alicante), Spain 1932

25. Henri Cartier-Bresson
Hyères, France 1932

26. Brassai
La Mort
n.d.

27. Helen Levitt
New York
c. 1940

28. Helen Levitt
New York
c. 1942

29. Helen Levitt
Untitled
c. 1942

30. Robert Doisneau
Sunday morning in Arcueil
1945

31. Robert Doisneau
Sidelong glance
1948

32. Harry Callahan
Detroit
1943

33. Lisette Model
Running Legs
1940-41

34. Weegee (Arthur Fellig)
Murder in Hell's Kitchen
n.d.

35. Louis Faurer
New York, Union Square
Through Window, 1948

36. Louis Faurer
Accident, New York City,
1950

37. Louis Faurer
Man with Goggles and Sign,
New York, 1947

38. Aaron Siskind
St. Louis 9
1953

39. Aaron Siskind
Chicago 206
1953

40. That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the
streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a
nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in
the tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the
road around practically forty-eight states in an old used
car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility,
mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow
photographed scenes that have never been seen before on
film.
- Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans

41. Robert Frank
From The Americans 1959

42. Robert Frank
From The Americans 1959

43. "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that
little camera that he raises and snaps with one
hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America
onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of
the world.“
Jack Kerouac

44. William Klein
Broadway and 103rd Street
New York
1954-55

45. William Klein
Contact sheet

46. Roy DeCarava
Man with portfolio
1959

47. Diane Arbus
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.
1962

48. Garry Winogrand
Los Angeles
1964

49. Garry Winogrand
American Legion Convention,
Dallas, Texas
1964

50. Winogrand 's work synthesizes the documentary and photojournalist
traditions. Influenced by Robert Frank's The Americans, he employed a
wide angle lens on a handheld camera, and shot from an intimate
distance. This enabled him to incorporate more of his subjects, and
gave his images an unfamiliar, compositional complexity. He took shots,
he said, "to see how things would look as photographs". The medium of
still photography he described as "the illusion of a literal description of
how a camera saw a piece of time and space".
In many ways these works are social satires of American life. They
dramatise the broad canvas of American society, with its diverse
classes, creeds and races jostling on the street. The formal turbulence
of his images with their dynamic tilted viewpoints, their grainy
immediacy, their frenetic crowds and their temporarily isolated
strangers, matches the political turbulence of the Vietnam years and
provides a defining portrait of a society caught unawares.

51. Lee Friedlander
New York
1963

52. Lee Friedlander
Lafayette, Louisiana
1968

53. Ray Metzker
Composites: Philadelphia (Apertures)
1965

54. Joel Meyerowitz
New York City
1975

55. Joel Meyerowitz
New York City
1976

56. John Harding
Untitled
1983-4

58. For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure
of following them, not because they particularly interested me.
I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their
movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.
At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed
a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd.
That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me
at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he
told me he was planning an imminent trip to Paris.
Sophie Calle

59. Sophie Calle
from Suite Venitienne 1983

60. William Eggleston
Miami
1980s

61. Alex Webb
Port au Prince, November 1987.
Killed by the army

62. Alex Webb
Port au Prince
1987.
from Under a Grudging Sun

63. Dolores Marat
Dans le métro à Auber
1988

64. Dolores Marat
Le Joueur d’acordéon
1994

65. Dolores Marat
L’Homme dans la nuit
1994

66. Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing
Signs that say what you want them to say and
not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say,
1992-1993

67. Gillian Wearing
Homage to the Woman the Bandaged Face Who
I Saw Yesterday Down Walworth Road
1995

68. Erwin Wurm
One minute sculptures,
Self-service series
1999.

69. Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Eddie Anderson; 21 years old; Houston, Texas; $20
1990

70. Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Head #13
2000/1