An exhibition catalogue typically advances either scholarly insight or popularity; a museum’s interests are bound up in extending its reputation and/or improving its bottom line. For readers, the end product of all that backstage ado usually pays minimal attention to organizational goals. Pleasures reside in gaining insights, seeing familiar works reproduced in new contexts, and discovering new works and artists in unforeseen alliances.

In the case of Lisa Hostetler’s Street Seen, published to accompany a 2010 exhibition of the same name at Milwaukee Art Museum, where Hostetler is Curator of Photographs, the pleasures are numerous. Scholarship here serves an audience eager to make new connections with familiar work; the intellectual space of “street photography” has its fervent adherents and rabid detractors, and Hostetler is not afraid to engage with the ongoing debate about spontaneous, instinctive photography in situ, out in the public areas of city life.

Hostetler wisely offers the following disclaimer: “The street, per se, is rarely the subject of the images to which the term is applied, and ‘street photography’ refers only occasionally to the practice of an itinerant entrepreneur who makes unsolicited snapshots of passersby and then tries to sell them to the subjects…. I have avoided using the term whenever possible.” What her selection describes, then, is a mode of photography that pushes the envelope of description, that seeks darkness and the inexplicable, that confutes the alleged truths of photography in favor of impressions and emotional resonance.




Hostetler makes exemplary use of images that happen to be in her collection: a pair of prints by Don Donaghy; a haunting Sid Grossman photograph titled Shooting Boy with Mask; a tremendous selection of color and b/w prints from Saul Leiter; Marvin Newman’s oddly calm typology of six pairs of women’s lower legs; and Ted Croner, whose winter street scenes mark him as a latter-day Stieglitz. Without having been able to see the show in Milwaukee, one can still enjoy the exhibition’s thrust and perceive how right the choices seem, on the whole. One forgivably museum-like (i.e. extraneous for publication) aspect of the book is its inclusion of a brief chapter on Action Painting and photography, perhaps motivated by the presence of works by Kline, de Kooning, and Pousette-Dart in Milwaukee’s collection (and by a hoped-for link with baseball impresario Bud Selig, who loaned a second de Kooning).




Street Seen does everyone the favor of expanding the field from New York City to Chicago, London, Paris, and other urban environs. One could be forgiven for thinking, based on most previous studies, that the entire school of street photographers was born, raised, and trained to stay on Manhattan with invisible fences that first shocked and later blinded them if they left the island. The selection of work includes the traumatic Bourke-White images of dead prisoners of war in German concentration camps, published in Life and Vogue in 1945, plus additional iconic combat images from World War II, underscoring photography’s increasing familiarity with the indescribable. The narrative closes at 1959, with the (U.S.) publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans, an apt demarcation. Frank, and his photographic mentor Louis Faurer (the subject of Hostetler’s Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, and very well utilized in Street Seen), represent the full embodying of a stance that asserted, in Frank’s words, that “it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.” In that way, a photographer’s psyche imprints itself on the image along with developed silver salts. —George Slade