Art

From snapshots of the corner to carefully staged indoor tableaux, the bountiful locations of street and studio must account for at least two thirds of all photographic output since the medium began. Even if lumped together, lesser categories such as landscape, abstract photography and other sundry subjects would make for a much smaller show. So, given the wealth of images from which this 350-strong ‘Urban History of Photography’ is chosen, any attempt at an entertaining and exhaustive survey was bound to end up being a bit exhausting as well.There’s a procession of nameless heroes caught unawares, from a London chimney sweep before 1900 to the stadium glare of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s 2001 ‘Heads’. Walker Evans did it better in his 1946 ‘Labor Anonymous, Detroit’, in which the characters’ trades and lifestyles are identifiable by dint of a necktie and briefcase or a grubby checked shirt and tool bag.

To some extent, this is a show of repeats and reruns, with vagrants and celebrities recurring most frequently throughout the age of the photograph – call it low life versus high life if you like. The twin thrusts of ‘Street and Studio’ come from the bourgeoisie’s need to represent itself through portraiture and the vicarious kick it gets from snooping on working class toil and hardship in the name of ‘documentation’. This is not to say that all photography is innately middle class – although its popularity is – it’s simply that a lot of time looking through the lens has also been spent looking either up or down the social hierarchies. Chief among the (too) many portrayals of homelessness is a slide show of ‘Sleepers’ by Francis Alÿs in which his camera points at snoozing down-and-outs from the pavement’s point of view, giving the audience the briefest glimpse of life in the gutter. Conversley, an amusing sequence of Cindy Sherman dressing up as various ‘Bus Riders’ in 1976 contains gratuitous parodies of regular folk on public transport (especially her use of blackface) that look ill advised and judgemental by today’s standards.
Class war is only half the battle, because there are also numerous emancipatory moments in the history of photography, whether racial, sexual or self-defining. Laure Anderson’s discovery that ‘photography is a kind of mugging or assault’ led the artist to get her own back on lewd men stopping her on the street. She simply snapped their picture and then blotted out their identities and predatory gazes with a simple censorship of the eyes.

Posers, paupers and princesses – there’s a lot of prying to be done in this show, but what’s to stop you breezing past all these bystanders, just as you might wander around Paris, New York or Hong Kong without ever pausing to take a picture of your own? Well, some of the faces in the crowd are undeniably attractive – especially Madame Yevonde’s 1935 portraits of British high-society starlets – while some are freakish enough to stop you in your tracks – more of the irrepressible Diane Arbus. There’s saddening work – Boris Mikhailov’s Russian tramps – as well as maddening images of death in Weegee’s ‘Corpse with Glasses’ and Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s ‘Striking Worker, Assassinated’. Yet, overwhelmingly, ‘Street and Studio’ feels observational and static rather than dynamic or original. Maybe photography is not going to age well after all.