Bystander
 Joel Meyerowitz, Colin Westerbeck
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Bulfinch Press
  ISBN: 0821227262


A History of Street Photography is a coffee table paperback containing a conversation between celebrated photographer, Joel Meyerowitz & curator-critic, Colin Westerbeck, that ranges across the history & importance of photography in everyday life. With dozens of black & white photos, & a few later colored ones, it explores more than 150 years of capturing spontaneous street scenes in America & around the globe.

What is street photography? I can better describe what it is not. It is not formal studio sittings nor capturing newsworthy moments. It is about catching a girl playing hopscotch on a New York side street, or a canal in an Oriental port town; a boy in a maze of unlit brick & plaster walls in Spain; a trio of portly matrons walking by a solitary working stiff; people staring out of a basement window; people meeting & greeting in London, Paris & Rome. Doorways, bridges, bullies & beauties, all around the world. Of barber shops & grimacing children; hot Texas street corners & chilly winter cities.

Some of the names of the photographers are legend among those who admire this informal & fascinating glimpse into the streets of our lives & times, cities & waterways -- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, et al. Farm Security Administration photographers such as Walker Evans & Dorothea Lange, also receive their due. Contemporary American photographers Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, & Helen Levitt are also included.

Bystander embraces the history of street photography as social & cultural document, it touches upon the work of acknowledged masters, yet leaves out so much about the actual photographs. I realize that the authors had to include a list of the collections from which the photos were used, however, so little was actually said about the photos.

Even after years at a London art school where I was taught to study things with an eye to composition, I am a rube. I know what I like & what makes no sense to me. I make no pretense at being anything else. Trying to follow what these two fellows said, they are obviously deeply emotional about the subject of street photography, simply went over my head in a rush of technical details & passionate positing as to why which photographer did what. Not nearly enough information about the who, where & what of the host of photographers.

Joel & Colin obviously enjoy each other. Perhaps the photographs would have been better served, had they kept their conversation to a minimal & included, instead, some headlines to newspapers of the same era as the photos, or a simple time chart of what was happening in the world at the time the photographers were out & about snapping real life in the making.

All in all, however, it is the photographs in Bystander that draw you back, again & again. The earliest ones that beg to have been enlarged, so rich in texture & composition; the later ones with their implicit social commentaries.

When we say a picture is worth a thousand words, we're not kidding! Each & every photograph, even those of which I couldn't make head nor tail, tell stories of our predecessors' lives & times, letting social history unravel before our eyes.

Bystander is for everyone who loves to look at the past, the ordinary, angular, light & shadow of cities, seen through the window of a camera.
(05/26/02)

Rebecca