AMSTERDAM.- The Van Gogh Museum presents The Street: Pioneers of 20th-Century Photography, on view through December 3. It is the second in a series of exhibitions organised while building work continues at the Rijksmuseum. This year the theme is street photography. How do photographers see life and people on the street and how has this vision changed from the late 19th century and through the 20th century? Many famous names in the Rijksmuseum’s photo collection are featured in this exhibition: from the earliest street photographers such as Thomas Annan and John Thomson to George Breitner, Andre Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, William Klein, Weegee and Emmy Andriesse.

Street photography gained a new impulse in the Netherlands with the work of Breitner (1857-1923), a painter and a photographer. He took his camera onto the streets of Amsterdam and photographed whatever happened to come his way. In that sense he can perhaps be described as the man who discovered street photography. Breitner introduced a new kind of perspective which became increasingly popular in 20th-century photography. He viewed his subjects with a dynamic, almost cinematic eye from deliberately unusual angles.

In the course of the 20th century street photography developed from views of scenes on city streets to portraits of the city’s inhabitants. This sharpening focus, zooming in on the subject, is the theme running through the exhibition, presented from various perspectives to allow visitors to contrast and compare. Traditional photo books such as Street Life in London by John Thomson, Paris de Nuit by Brassaï and Sweet Life by Ed van der Elsken complement the overall picture.

In the 20th century photographers crept increasingly into the skin of their subject and so, whether by accident or design, captured major and minor human dramas on film. The street, the principal location of human intercourse, became a genre in its own right and a constant theme of modern photography.