HITTING THE STREETS FOR ‘VITAL’ PHOTOS

“The street is one of the richest and most vital sources for photographers. There’s a growing interest in it as street life revives in urban centers like San Diego.”

That’s how Arthur Ollman, executive director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, feels about the Balboa Park museum’s exhibit “Masters of the Street II.” As curator, Ollman has selected 120 photographs by Andre Kertesz, William Klein, Helen Levitt and Lisette Model. Though they share the street as a common resource, each artist has a unique attitude and vision and creates images that have distinctive characteristics.

Street photography is of special interest to Ollman, who is himself a photographer with a substantial reputation. The museum’s first street scene exhibit, with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka and Garry Winogrand, opened in December to great critical as well as popular acclaim. Ollman expects this second show in the series of three to generate at least equal interest and enthusiasm.

“Street scenes were a common subject of artists before photography, but the hand-held camera with fast film made it possible to develop the idiom as never before,” Ollman said. “There is a consistent interest in it, and it is certain that it will endure as a photographic tradition.

“It’s also basically an urban art form. It developed in the cities of Europe, and although there are scenes of rural life, the great mass of material is about city street life.

“There is, of course, a strong tradition of street photography in New York,” he said. “And here in the west it has long been appreciated in San Francisco, which has a vital, colorful street life. But in Southern California it’s not strong. However, things are changing. It relates to the new interest and pride that San Diegans feel about their own downtown.”

Once he starts, Ollman is unstoppable, his joy in his subject disguising his didactic purpose.

“The key figure in the exhibition is Kertesz. He’s 91 and living in New York, but he’s still not all that well known to Americans. But his reputation is growing to match his achievements. He was born in Hungary and began making photographs during World War I to create a visual diary. In 1925 he went to Paris to become an artist and associated with Mondrian, Brancusi and Man Ray, among others. He gave fellow-Hungarian Brassai his first camera and taught him how to use it. In the late ‘30s he came to New York on assignment and was caught here by the outbreak of World War II. He turned to doing commercial work, which tended to overshadow his importance as an artist. It’s only since the late 1960s that he’s garnered the respect he deserves.

“Kertesz is famous for his epigram, ‘Photography is the art of the split second.’ He really invented the aesthetic of the small camera. Although Cartier-Bresson coined the term ‘decisive moment,’ Kertesz first realized this photographic phenomenon. His characteristics are a refined, European sensitivity to design and respect for the distance between himself and his subjects. He is in the tradition of European humanism, good and kind.”

Ollman added, “Lisette Model, who died just two years ago, was a student of Kertesz’s wife, Elizabeth. She was tougher, a master of confrontational photography. She stalked her subjects, isolating them, single-framing them, pinning them down like insects for study. She was my teacher and Diane Arbus’. You should have seen this unflappable, little grandmotherly figure tracking subjects in North Beach when she was teaching in San Francisco. She looked for the grotesque, but she wasn’t cruel. Arbus was more intense. Lisette would say to me, ‘Arthur, you have to see everything, look at everything. Don’t look away.’ And her photographs speak for themselves.”

Ollman said William Klein is also a confrontational photographer.

“He practices a kind of ‘immersion photography.’ He pushes the camera at arms’ length right into a group of people with the result that he pulls viewers into his crowded images. They become participants with the people in the streets. He has that New York abrasiveness that he kept when he moved to Paris in 1948. He comes within dangerous personal distance in his art and believes in making a photograph happen. The camera is there, people respond to it, they reveal who they are and create self-portraits.”

Finally Ollman came to Helen Levitt. He relaxed, sat back. His voice softened.

“Levitt is also a New Yorker, but very different from Klein. She is almost invisible in the way she blends into the environment. There’s no confrontation. She waits for the moment and shoots. She doesn’t intrude or call attention to herself. She doesn’t want her subjects to become self-conscious and destroy the naivete of the image. She has perhaps the fastest eye in the medium.

“She makes pictures so quickly that her vision seems transparent. There’s no personal flavoring to it. Her style depends so completely upon a quality of transparency, it might be called a ‘white style.’ It’s an approach that blurs the distinction between what the artist does and what was provided by the subject. She never editorializes, but you’re aware of her empathy for people. She’s like Kertesz in keeping her distance and in her humaneness.”

All four photographers are cult figures, not widely known beyond circles of connoisseurs. Ollman is confident, however, that their works will appeal to San Diegans at a time when an urban mentality is quickly developing in their city.

The exhibit, designed by museum staffer Joseph Bellows, will recreate a street environment, with park benches, a lamp post and trees.

At at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 3, Ollman will present a lecture with slides on “Andre Kertesz: Leader of the Street Gang.”

The exhibit runs through Oct. 13.