“In the ’40s and intothe early ’50s, it was not terribly clear that America was going to be asuperpower and rule the world ... There were these undertones of anxiety,”Hostetler says. Anxiety and modernity are two undercurrents that run throughthe urban landscapes as photographed by Louis Faurer, Lisette Model, RobertFrank, Ted Croner, William Klein and Saul Leiter.
The show, which has itsroots in Hostetler’s 1996 dissertation on Faurer, is comprised of images fromurban life in America.Many of the photographs were taken in New York, though a first edition of Frank’s The Americans gives “Street Seen”national reach. The city, Hostetler posits, is a stand-in for a wider postwar issue,“the urban situationthe individual confronting society at large and trying tofind their place in the modern world.”
During her research,Hostetler realized that Lisette Model, an émigré from Viennaby way of Paris,“had a lot more impact and visibility during Word War II than had beenpreviously pointed out in the history of photography.” In Model’s uniqueposition as a European transplant that trained with composer Arnold Schoenberg,Hostetler finds a confluence of European sensibility inscribed on Model’s viewof America.
“[Her] first two seriescombined elements of avant-garde photography from Europe, which would includethe New Vision and Surrealism, with her experience of America,”Hostetler says. Model’s Running Legs(1940) harks back to her studies with Schoenberg, she notes: “You can almosthear the atonality of the rush hour when you look at the feet running throughthe city.”
In “Street Seen,”Hostetler finds conceptual connections among the works of avant-gardephotographers and their contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists. “Althoughtheir artworks may look formally different, they’re both taking a reallyunconventional approach to the use of the materials… nontraditionalcompositions, cropping important parts out intentionally, blurriness,graininess.” This kinship with Abstract Expressionism is most palpable in thework of Saul Leiter, who was trained as a painter and worked in bothblack-and-white and color. In Leiter’s Canopy(1958), three-quarters of the frame is composed of the interior of a blackcanopy, obscuring most of the action in front of the camera. Leiter’s unusualcomposition pushes the photograph from a mere document of men moving through acity street to a painterly image that is as much about the photographer’s pointof view, or participation in the act of making an image, as it is about hissubjects.
While the photographersof “Street Seen” capture images of figures moving through the urban landscape,some abstracted and cropped into obscurity, as in Model’s Running Legs, they also focus on the individual figure in thefaceless masses. The appearance of eccentrics and everyday people on themargins of society, Hostetler says, “was one way of including them in thepicture of Americathat counteract[ed] the tendency toward homogeneity that the burgeoningconsumer society was advocating.”
“StreetSeen” offers a welcome counterpoint tothe rose-colored, whitewashed nostalgia perpetuated by commercial photographyof the postwar era, and paints instead a composite portrait of a diverse humanlandscape during a tumultuous, uncertain time in American history.
“Street Seen: The Psychological Gesturein American Photography, 1940-1959” opens at the Milwaukee Art MuseumJan. 30 and runs through April 25.
