NONFICTION - April 30, 1995

BYSTANDER: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (Bulfinch: $60; 430 pp.) Street photography is a singularly ego-less approach to art making, one that finds the artist truly in service of the world. A desire for anonymity is central to the sensibility of all street photographers, who ask nothing more than to be allowed to candidly record life as they find it. Poised between photo-journalism and fine art it is, in essence, an homage to the theater of the street--an art that reads as strangely exotic in Los Angeles, legendary for its lack of street life.

Born in Paris in the mid 19th Century, and built on ideas central to the novels of Flaubert and Balzac--French writers with an allegiance to realism that was nothing short of revolutionary in its day--street photography went on to find it’s second most hospitable home in Manhattan. Both Paris and New York are urbane, walking cities where life is largely lived in crowded streets.

Revolving around one very simple idea--find an attractive setting then wait for people to wander into it and do something--street photography is the photographic equivalent of a Duchampian readymade. As such, the central challenge resides in the fact that it’s an art created out of unstable materials. Denied the luxury of lighting and arranging his compositions, the street photographer must catch his pictures on the wing by developing an infallible eye for “the decisive moment.” A term coined by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who took the form to unprecedented heights by synthesizing ideas drawn from Surrealism, Communism and Cubism, “The Decisive Moment” is also the title of Cartier-Bresson’s seminal book of street photography published in 1952.

This exemplary book on street photography chronicles its rich history in a style at once scholarly and highly readable. Written by a curator (Westerbeck is the associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago), and an artist (Meyerowitz began his career as a street photographer--three images from this period of his career are included here--then went on to develop a style revolving around a masterful control of color and light), “Bystander” reads like a friendly conversation, complete with witty asides and fascinating bits of trivia.

Divided into four chronological periods, each of which is dominated by one of four artists the authors deem to be the genre’s most important figures--Eugene Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Robert Frank--the book offers a solid argument for the idea that the form hit its stride during World War II in the work of Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Robert Doisneau. Also discussed in depth are Hungarian photographers Andre Kertesz and Brassai, Mexican artist Manuel Alvarez Bravo, New Yorkers William Klein and Weegee, and the American FSA photographers of the 30s.

There are, however, a few things missing. There are no reproductions of work by the incomparable Robert Frank, who only allows his work to be reproduced in books that he initiates. William Eggleston isn’t even mentioned in the book, nor is Danny Lyon or Mary Ellen Mark. Those shortcomings aside, “Bystander” is a hugely satisfying book, and many thought-provoking things surface in paging through it; the more fascinating is the realization that it’s impossible to take a “candid” photograph of anything other than man, because it is only man who attempts to obscure his true nature.