The phrase “street photography” conjures a black-and-white shot of mid-century New York or Paris, in which unwitting bit players hurry about their business, revealing some idiosyncratic detail — a grimace, a stole, a sandwich board — to the quick-eyed observer on the other side of the lens. In that tradition, tabloid starkness merges with surreal poetry and a dollop of mystery. Who are these anonymous bystanders, we wonder? What do they tell us about urban tumult or the cacophony of inner lives?
An image by Cartier-Bresson or Lee Friedlander alchemises a moment of metropolitan chaos into a metaphor: a glimpse into a subject’s psyche, or one of those odd encounters that happen between strangers who, for a moment, share a patch of sidewalk small enough to fit in the frame. “Sometimes I feel like the world is a place I bought a ticket to,” Garry Winogrand once said. “It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.”
Now, the International Center of Photography invites us to rethink the entire category by recruiting young photographers from all over the world who don’t share their forerunners’ reverence for chance encounters, spontaneous lyricism or symbolically loaded juxtapositions. Instead, they gravitate to the physical beauty of crowded metropolitan spaces, intensified by strong colours and animated by hyperactive ghosts. They imbue Winogrand’s “big show” with a sense of ceremony.
In one of Debrani Das’s supersaturated spectacles of India, “Cartwheels of Pushkar”, a boy performs an exuberant flip on an amusement park trampoline, his splayed limbs rhyming with the spokes of two separate Ferris wheels, his airborne rear end apparently positioned to receive a kiss from a passing camel. In “Kolkata Night”, three tired, dead-eyed vendors hoist their LED-festooned umbrellas in grim demonstrations of the festive spirit, while a herd of cows parades by in the foreground.
Das’s intertwining of ancient ways, modern glitter and dazzling hues can be read as portraits of contemporary India. The photographer Raghubir Singh (who’s not in this show) once claimed that the nation’s “fundamental condition” is “the cycle of rebirth, in which colour is not just an essential element but also a deep inner source, reaching into the subcontinent’s long and rich past”.
But the technique of juxtaposing history with the flimsy present transcends geography. You see it in the work of the Palestinian-Egyptian Randa Shaath, who documents the way in which, in Cairo, the street is an extension of home. A small flock of mop-coated sheep sprawl in the middle of a cul-de-sac while a knot of humans gossip nearby. Shaath has her roots in photojournalism, and her subtle, active shots have the immediacy of news. In one, a couple of guys have staked out a makeshift living room on the sidewalk, with a hard wooden chair for each man, a plusher model for their feline buddy, and even a small side table to hold the bottle of whatever they’re drinking that day. She immortalises the way big city people all over the world form nuanced connections on the streets, forging relationships out of happenstance and proximity.
Many of the photographers in the show celebrate informal pockets of freedom; Alexey Titarenko documents its terrors. Born and raised in what was then Leningrad, he witnessed the Soviet Union’s traumatising transformation into post-Communist Russia, a period when upheaval followed crisis, alternating with unrest. In a series of thrillingly allusive photos from the early 1990s, long exposures simultaneously slow and accelerate the warp-speed metamorphoses. Citizens who once addressed each other as comrade and now barely seem to speak at all slip blurrily through space like memories, haunting the boulevards of Titarenko’s birthplace.
In one of his most powerful images, a hazy crowd flows up the stairs from a subway station like a sulphurous cloud. A single detail resists the force of change: a pair of ownerless shoes rests on a step, toes pointed back towards the subterranean realm. Perhaps the footwear’s been left there by some unfortunate soul swept away while resisting history’s undertow.
Another poetic picture catches two young women in white dresses crossing a wide avenue. The scene couldn’t be more unremarkable, but the drama lies in the contrast between the sharply defined city — cobblestones, trolley tracks, opening hours posted in a shop window — and the wispy figures who move through it like angels in billowing robes. A third image in the same series depicts a makeshift newsstand papered with headlines, celebrity portraits and porn. This panoply of printed words basks in the light, while the vendor, a barely discernible wraith in winter coat and hood, lurks in cavelike darkness. She could be a victim, a threat, or both.
The exhibition runs into trouble when it veers from subtle expressivity towards blunt activism. A section called “Protest & Advocacy” bubbles over with clichés: raised fists, old slogans, silent roars. Scenes of mass outrage tend to look similar, regardless of continent or cause, and even freshly observed uprisings feel second-hand when you see a lot of them in one go.
Among the nearly 40 pictures in this segment, one or two by Lam Yik Fei, taken during the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations, catch the eye. A slender man in sleeveless T-shirt and gym shorts might be heading for a pick-up basketball game, except for the miner’s helmet, work gloves and gas mask that round out his outfit. He stands on a boulevard’s raised median and, at his shoulders, a vast crowd in similar gear fans out symmetrically like a force of slightly slovenly robots, waiting for violence. There’s something at once poignant and alarming about the mixture of boredom and readiness, technology and bare flesh.
A photographer can make a daylight street scene burn with mystery or tease mournfulness out of a moment of joy. Events can do that too, transforming an image between the time it’s taken and the time it’s seen. In 2018, Efrat Sela documented a day at the beach: a group of West Bank women dressed in abayas plashing in the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv. Her images were touching then because what was normal on one side of a fence was unprecedented on the other. To make those few hours of pleasure happen, an Israeli activist group had to shepherd the Palestinians through checkpoints and cultural barriers for their first sight of the sea.
Today, such scenes are unthinkable in that part of the world. In just a few years, Sela’s photographs have turned from warming, sun-filled vignettes of cross-border fellowship into tragic echoes of life before cataclysm.
To January 6, icp.org
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