CategoriesStyles and Movements
Street Photography
Candid photographs of people and incidents in public places, from the handheld cameras of the 1920s to the present.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Candid pictures of strangers in public, caught in moments that will not recur, became possible with portable cameras and fluent with the Leica, launched in 1925 for 35mm film. Henri Cartier-Bresson used one to freeze a man leaping a puddle in Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (1932), and his book The Decisive Moment (1952) gave the pursuit its best-known ideal: form and event aligning in a fraction of a second.
Brassaï photographed Paris by night, Helen Levitt caught children's games and chalk drawings in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, and Robert Doisneau found humour on Parisian pavements. Later photographers loosened the frame: Garry Winogrand tilted and crowded it, Daido Moriyama's grainy, blurred Tokyo pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s rejected polish, and Mark Cohen worked at arm's length with flash. Dawoud Bey's portraits made in Harlem in the 1970s show a more collaborative approach, asking people to pose.
Related artists
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Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program
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