During the Eisenhower years, New York functioned as the megacapital of a super power in the Cold War—a site of artistic innovation and, for photographers, an indispensable target that stimulated their work. Images of the city convey an estranged view, at odds with the prosperous look of its streets. Crowds take a possessive hold of the public space, or uncentered figures drift within it. The pictorial mood is introspective, faces are sullen, and the weather is glum. New York seems to be affected by a nameless malaise. William Klein grittily pictured a mediascape that heckled citizens with an acid and ludicrous cheer. The ostensible seduction of Dan Weiner’s El Morocco looks tawdry. Louis Faurer’s and Saul Leiter’s intimate images catch an elegiac note in an atmosphere of jostle and shove. Their style was grainy and gestural, emotive with blur. In the manner of loners, they perceived the metropolis as a busy void. These photographers and others, such as Leon Levinstein and Leonard Freed, implied that they were outsiders, cruising within an ominous host culture. They could not accommodate themselves to the metropolis any more than they could dismiss it. The 1960s jamboree of media, commercial, and entertainment cultures did much to transform this outlook in the following years. To be sure, Bruce Davidson continued the humanist documentary tradition in Harlem, and Garry Winogrand acted as the classic modernist photographer of an addled urban scene. But Diane Arbus’s work innovatively crossbred—and denatured—photographic genres. Wherever she went, Arbus endowed her subjects with a decorous or seedy strangeness that came to have an astonishing normalcy. Arthur Leipzig (b. 1918) Coney Island—Steeplechase, 1952 Vintage gelatin-silver print, 10 1/2 x 10 1/4 in. (26.7 x 26 cm) © Arthur Leipzig, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York