Unfamiliar Street: The Photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Abstract

It is strangely difficult to consider what is meant by street photography, both for those who write about it and for the photographers for whom the street is their location and, to varying degrees, their subject. This is due in large part to the remarkable success of a genre that is most often championed through reference to its so-called “greats”—photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, and Garry Winogrand—and, more tellingly still, through a familiarity and popularity that has seen it become the stock and trade of photography blogs and image-sharing sites. Much of this popularity is predicated on a modernist aestheticization based in the contingency of city life, its spontaneity and dynamism. In this familiar form of street photography, urban experience is presented as universal and the city removed from a specific, fixed location.