Street life: the photographers who captured the spirit of post-war New York

Street photography spans the globe — from Tokyo-based Daido Moriyama, to Brassaï and Robert Doisneau in Paris between the wars, to Don McCullin, whose photographs of London launched his career. Arguably the greatest street photographer of them all, Henri Cartier-Bresson, captured urban life in the cities of many continents. 

Yet it is surely New York — perhaps because of its incomparable energy and unrivalled diversity — that has given most to this restless art form, and made it the arena of choice for many of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, including Elliot Erwitt (b. 1928), Robert Frank (1924-2019), Ilse Bing (1899-1998), Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), Diane Arbus (1923-1971), Louis Faurer (1916-2001), Helen Levitt (1913-2009), William Klein (b. 1928), Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) and Weegee (1899-1968). 

Here we take a look at some of American street photography’s most influential players, whose prints come to auction frequently, and who have remained highly collectable on both the primary and secondary markets. Christie’s will offer many of these important names in the Photographs sale on 6 April 2021 in New York.  

Walker Evans

Walker Evans’s 1938 American Photographs  exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the accompanying groundbreaking publication, catapulted him to fame. The exhibition mostly presented images of the American South made for the Resettlement Administration of the Department of Agriculture. The goal was to show how Americans throughout the country were affected by the Great Depression and expose their socio-economic plight.

Soon after this exhibition, Evans made a series of New York City subway portraits, discreetly photographing subway passengers with a 35mm camera. These raw images were the artist’s attempt at spontaneous objectivity, which was a quintessentially modern take on photographic portraiture.

Berenice Abbott

Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, Berenice Abbott studied sculpture in Paris and then Berlin. After returning to Paris, she became an assistant at the Man Ray Studio. She arrived in New York some years later, in 1929, and embarked on a body of documentary work that would culminate in a travelling exhibition and an important publication, Changing New York — a book that showed the city’s landscape in flux.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank’s influential photobook The Americans  is the result of the artist’s two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships (1955 and 1956). Frank’s use of quick snapshots and slanted viewpoints brought a new expressiveness to documentary photography. Building on Evans’s American Photographs, the sophisticated sequencing of images in The Americans  makes it a landmark in photographic history.

Helen Levitt

In Helen Levitt’s images of New York, mostly made during the late 1930s and the 1940s, viewers are presented with familiar characters — often children — from her own working-class neighbourhood. The writer James Agee once described Levitt’s work as ‘the ordinary metropolitan soil which breeds these remarkable juxtapositions and moments… reality in its unmasked vigour and grace’.

Louis Faurer

Philadelphia-born Louis Faurer balanced street photography with a distinguished career in fashion journalism. He was an artist who embraced photography as ‘an act of living’, expressing the cacophony of the city through his images of Times Square, Union Square and other lively neighbourhoods. His empathetic portraits of figures embedded in the urban environment — often revealing a comic sensibility — hint at an interest in the subconscious.

Diane Arbus

Taught by both Berenice Abbott and Lisette Model, Diane Arbus had an attraction to subjects inhabiting worlds vastly different from her own privileged upbringing. In her 1962 application to the Guggenheim Foundation, her list of projects included ‘children’s games; sideshows; secret photos of steam bathers; photographs at the beach; movie theatre interiors; and female impersonators’. Arbus opened up the field of documentary photography by establishing a remarkable closeness to the subjects she encountered, resulting in images of arresting intensity and intimacy.