Category: Street Photography Photo Books

We discuss and review Street Photography Photo Books here at www.street-photography.net

  • Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

    Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

    Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, published by powerHouse Books in 2011, edited by John Maloof, with a foreword by Geoff Dyer.

    The photo book is a collection of 100 duotone street photographs taken during the 1950s in New York and Chicago, as far as I can tell. Vivian Maier’s story is as interesting and mysterious as her large, extraordinary body of work.

    Vivian Maier, New York, NY

    Vivian Maier is an enigma and one of the best street photographers, shoulder to shoulder with Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson. What we currently know of Vivian is that she was born in New York and spent her youth between the U.S. and France. In 1951, at age 25, she moved from France to New York. By 1956, she had settled in Chicago, where she worked as a professional nanny for 40 years.

    Vivian Maier

    With a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex (TLR) medium-format camera, she made over 100,000 negatives between the 1950s and 1990s, in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. Later in her life, she became destitute and was taken care of by the Gensburg brothers, whom she had looked after as children. She had kept her vast collection of negatives, prints, and unexposed film in storage units. After failed payments, those units went to auction. In 2007, two years before her death, John Maloof, Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow bought them, discovered her body of work, and began publishing it.

    Vivian Maier, New York 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier. Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

    Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is one of the only photo books in my library that the photographer did not compile or curate herself. I really appreciate that these three men exposed the world to Maier’s photography, which otherwise would never have been seen. On first viewing, however, the sequencing, presentation, printing, and selection of photos—with no context or depth—show the lack of John Maloof’s understanding of photography.

    Despite its flaws, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is visually arresting, emotionally resonant, and produced with care. It serves as an introduction. It draws you in, it inspires, and it leaves you wanting more.

  • Gordon Parks: Segregation Story (Expanded Edition)

    Gordon Parks: Segregation Story (Expanded Edition)

    Gordon Parks: Segregation Story (Expanded Edition), published in 2014 by Steidl, is a powerful look at the struggle against racism and segregation in 1956 Alabama.

    Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was an African American documentary photojournalist, fashion photographer, activist, composer, author, poet, filmmaker, painter, and magazine founder.

    During the year long Montgomery bus boycott, Life magazine sent Parks to Alabama to document African Americans living under Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. Over the course of several weeks in the summer 1956, he photographed the daily life of an extended African-American family, the Causeys. His choice to use colour film (not widely used at the time in photojournalism) brings an immediacy and intimate feel to the images.

    Department store 1956, Gordon Parks

    On September 24, 1956, Life magazine published a selection of 26 images as part of the photo-essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” The bulk of images from his assignment in 1956 was thought to have been lost. In 2011, five years after Parks’s death, The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered more than seventy color transparencies at the bottom of an old storage bin marked “Segregation Series” that are now published for the first time in The Segregation Story.

    Untitled 1956, Gordon Parks

    This new edition of Gordon Parks’ Segregation Story, showcases enhanced reproductions created from Parks’ original transparencies. In addition to unseen images from the series, the expanded Segregation Story includes a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey. Alongside texts from the first edition by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

    Untitled 1956, Gordon Parks

    The beautiful colours and rich hues in this edition of Segregation Story, is in itself worth owning. But the story, one of dignity and perseverance, in a world segregated by skin colour, is haunting and as relevant today as it was then.

    Gordon Parks summed up his photographic career of over 60 years with this pithy statement: ”

    “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America – poverty, racism, discrimination.”

  • Robert Frank’s “The Americans”

    Robert Frank’s “The Americans”

    First published in France in 1958 and subsequently in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most impactful and influential photobooks. A Swiss émigré, Frank brought an unflinching outsider’s perspective on America, similar to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America a hundred and twenty years earlier.

    ‘Funeral, St. Helena, South Carolina’ 1955/56, Robert Frank

    Over a 9 month period from 1955 to 1956 Frank exhaustingly traveled across more than 30 states covering 10,000 miles, exposing 767 rolls of film. 

    Robert Frank’s The Americans (the twelfth Steidl edition, 2019) is based on the first Steidl 2008 edition, which was produced under Robert Frank’s supervision. The book contains 83 photographs, presented one per page, and includes an introduction by Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, who powerfully captures Frank’s work in words.*

    “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”

    – Jack Kerouac

    That little camera Kerouac was referencing was a Leica III fitted with a Nikkor S.C 5cm (50mm) f/1.4.

    Rodeo — New York City, 1955/56, Robert Frank


    The balanced sequencing of movement and stillness imbues the book with a lyrical narrative. The honesty and rawness of Frank’s photos strip back the patina of the postwar Eisenhower era, painting a poignant and incomparable portrait of mid-century America.

    Ranch market, Hollywood 1955/56 Robert Frank

    Robert Frank’s The Americans has had an undeniably profound influence on street and documentary photographers, including myself. It would take a series of articles to cover everything I have personally learned and applied to my own street photography from this book. The Americans is a quintessential book to have in your library and one to reference often before you head out to photograph.