Financial Times – The phrase “street photography” conjures a black-and-white shot of mid-century New York or Paris, in which unwitting bit players hurry about their business, revealing some idiosyncratic detail — a grimace, a stole, a sandwich board — to the quick-eyed observer on the other side of the lens. In that tradition, tabloid starkness merges with surreal poetry and a dollop of mystery. Who are these anonymous bystanders, we wonder? What do they tell us about urban tumult or the cacophony of inner lives?
An image by Cartier-Bresson or Lee Friedlander alchemises a moment of metropolitan chaos into a metaphor: a glimpse into a subject’s psyche, or one of those odd encounters that happen between strangers who, for a moment, share a patch of sidewalk small enough to fit in the frame. “Sometimes I feel like the world is a place I bought a ticket to,” Garry Winogrand once said. “It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.”
Now, the International Center of Photography invites us to rethink the entire category by recruiting young photographers from all over the world who don’t share their forerunners’ reverence for chance encounters, spontaneous lyricism or symbolically loaded juxtapositions. Instead, they gravitate to the physical beauty of crowded metropolitan spaces, intensified by strong colours and animated by hyperactive ghosts. They imbue Winogrand’s “big show” with a sense of ceremony.
Image: ‘Cartwheels of Pushkar’ by Debrani Das