TUCSON, ARIZONA.- New York City exerts a powerful hold on the American imagination. The site of triumph and tragedy, home to the fabulously wealthy and the desperately poor, boasting modern technology and historical tradition, New York represents the contradictions inherent in our national identity. As such it has always posed an irresistible challenge to photographers, notably those who came to be known as the “ New York School”: Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Weegee, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, and others. Active from the close of the Great Depression through the early 1970s, these individuals made vital contributions to a collective portrait of the city and its inhabitants. On the street they witnessed, experienced---and, with their cameras, exposed---existential conditions ranging from alienation and despair to freedom and community.

In the early years of the twentieth century, photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz celebrated New York’s modernity by infusing it with a certain romanticism. World War I and the Great Depression suggested new agendas to photographers such as Lewis Hine and his successors in the Photo League (Sid Grossman and Walter Rosenblum among them), who used the medium to reveal the social inequities of contemporary urban life. Following World War II, America manifested its superpower status through a mass consumer culture in which photography played many crucial roles. Tabloids, the popular weeklies Life and Look, and fashion magazines fostered overlapping, often competing, categories of professional photographic practice. Many of those associated with the New York School participated in this market while nonetheless resisting categorization.

A subject as multifaceted as New York naturally encourages, indeed demands, depiction from many different viewpoints. Thus there is no single New York School style. If a fundamental idea unites these photographers, it is a desire to defend the medium’s significance as “a way of seeing” (to adopt a book title of Helen Levitt’s). Certain moods and textures do predominate, however. Most of the New York School photographers rejected the large-format cameras used by their predecessors, instead taking up the 35mm Leica, a small, hand-held camera that allowed for stealthy, rapid exposures in available light. With this new tool, they could capture the street as they perceived it: in fragments, glimpsed rather than gazed upon, a psychological as well as physical space. Cockeyed camera angles, inconsistent focus, close cropping, layered reflections, and grainy printing are among the operative formal devices in the New York School ’s redefinition of photographic realism. Their complex, demanding, aggressive, morally ambivalent images challenged, and ultimately changed, our view of the metropolis that still symbolizes America ’s problems and promise.