 Photographers evoked the indigence and anxiety of the Depression in New York through poignant vignettes of a fallen culture. Walker Evans and Ben Shahn were its poets. Evans evoked the hardscrabble existence of New Yorkers by observing their expressions and gestures. Shahn captured the effect of stagnant hours upon the body language of underemployed men and women. He did so with a dynamic new style of street photography—grabbed, notational, and often intrusive—made possible by the advent of the Leica, a handy, roll film, rapid-fire camera. Instead of waiting for something to happen, or setting up a scene, the photographer could now poke into the action. Metropolitan life no longer appears as constituted by “events” so much as made up of sudden glimpses. This characteristically modern perception of the passerby was intensified by photographers who were both self-conscious artists and scrupulous documentarians. Most of them learned their craft on the streets, like Morris Engel, Walter Rosenblum, Alexander Alland, and Aaron Siskind. Their concerns were pursued in courses, lectures, and exhibitions at the Photo League, founded in 1936 as a forum for socially engaged projects in photography. Members of the Photo League, many of them Jewish, were devoted to the principle that the country’s democratic system was accountable to all its citizens, no matter what their creed, ethnicity, or race—a belief that then sounded radical to the American public. Meanwhile, New York continued to develop as the paramount site of construction, media, and popular culture in the United States. Berenice Abbott concentrated on storefronts and, along with Margaret Bourke-White, on the tall, serrated skyline of the city, conceiving it as a spectacle of power. Edward Steichen, once a misty Pictorialist, was now an impresario of fashion at Vogue; and the recently established Life sent Otto Hagel to the New York Stock Exchange, where he recorded a happy moment. |
|
