Newspaper Article

THE STREETS OF CHICAGO CELEBRATING THE IMPROBABLE COMBINATIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS OF CIY LIFE

Colin Westerbeck. Colin Westerbeck is associate curator of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and co-author with Joel Meyerowitz of "Bystander, A History of Street Photography" (Little Brown), from which this article is

1994

Overview

But within a generation another Parisian, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was making images that capture perfectly all the improbable contradictions and momentary combinations that are thrown together, side by side, in modern cities. Working with a small hand camera and traveling the world, he created pictures that succeed not only as photojournalism but as modern art, to which an international outlook like his has always been essential. It could even be said that because of the uniqueness to Paris of Atget's vision, as compared to the universality of Cartier-Bresson's, these men divided between them all the possibilities street photography contains. As crucial as Paris has been to photography's history, however, it isn't the only place where such crosscurrents between the local and the universal have existed. The same was true of Chicago at a certain point. The poignant, almost desolate vision that Atget created for Paris alone and the internationalist program for photography that Cartier- Bresson's work suggests have both had a counterpart here. The two approaches existed in Chicago, moreover, not as mutually exclusive alternatives but as a paradoxically rich mixture in the work of a single group of photographers-those who were either teachers or students at the Institute of Design from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. The key figure here is Harry Callahan, who directed the institute's photography program from 1949 until 1961. His achievement was to take a set of modernist principles that had originated before the war at the German art school known as the Bauhaus and give them a meaning immediate to Chicago through street photography that he himself did along with students such as Ray Metzker, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Ken Josephson and Barbara Crane.

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