The city fascinates. It repels even as it seduces. Very early on, it became a favoured theme of many artists, and a preferential space for multifarious artistic experimentation. Attentive to the movement and spectacle embodied in the everyday of the city, for more than a century artists have captured, with keen sensitivity, the fleeting moments so closely tied to urban existence.
Photography quickly emerged as the preferred tool for observing the urban landscape and the mechanisms of its evolution. Rapid, precise, the photographic apparatus seizes with acuity the quickened pace of life. It freezes events, captures architectural details and spaces, and especially, it preserves a multiplicity of information as part of our collective memory. Many photographers—including Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Nègre, Stieglitz and others, and more particularly those associated with the American school (Evans, Franck, Friedlander and Strand, among others)—chose the specific genre of documentary photography to represent multiple facets of the modern city. Passersby, the street, architecture, urban signs, but also the heterogeneity of populations all captivated these photographers, as much from the viewpoint of social reportage as aesthetic practice. They journeyed through the city seeking pictures, making the street the jumping-off point for a much more subjective photographic form—one committed to capturing a new vision of the world. The aesthetics of American street photography would profoundly mark the history of the art form, and would become a model for future generations of city-surveyor practitioners.
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