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Shot After Shot
John Haberin New York City
Mark Steinmetz and Hans Breder
We Are Here: Street Photography
How does a photographer capture the decisive moment? In the case of Mark Steinmetz, it took sticking to the American South for nearly a quarter of a century, waiting for lightning to strike.
In the case of Robert Frank, it meant taking enough pictures, but leave that story to another time. Look instead at Hans Breder, who finds another way entirely, in an unorthodox side of early Modernism. 
Breder places a woman's body in front of and behind a mirror—or does he? It takes a cool eye to know the anxious object. Besides, think keeping up with the news is hard? What about keeping up with the streets?
With "We Are Here," the International Center of Photography exhibits "scenes from the streets," and its title is an assertion. It speaks for the show's subjects, in sixteen countries, asserting their presence and demanding a voice. It speaks to the pace of the streets and the very nature of a photography, snapping away as best it can. We are here, it says, and soon we will be gone. What, though, will anyone remember? And what has happened to photography's decisive moment?
The mirror and the lightning
More than sixty years ago, M. H. Abrams compared two metaphors for literature and art. Where classicists spoke of holding a mirror up to nature, he wrote, the Romantics saw an active mind illuminating nature as under a lamp. With Mark Steinmetz, make that a bolt of lightning. In 1994 he photographed just that, descending from the clouds to strike a four-lane highway. It seems to draw the converging parallels together, set one side askew, and throw trees to either side to the wind. Its stark white reflection in wet Tarmac extends all the way to the foreground, cutting across the stripes between lanes and casting an eerie shadow just a few feet away.
Steinmetz captured a decisive moment, perhaps the ultimate decisive moment—but that ideal has long meant the pursuit of perfection, and his turf is anything but perfect. It is the South over more than twenty years, although he has also worked in Los Angeles along with Winogrand, and it means enough to him that he titles every photograph with a place name. It is a world of trailer parks and gas stations at night. It is where a young woman lies on her back on a mattress on the floor or on the hood of a car, fast food by her side. That lightning strike took place in Mississippi, and it just barely missed a truck, which barrels ahead oblivious to danger. The bright headlamps and distant silhouette are the sole objects on the road apart from the water and the light.
He will have anyone looking for the smallest sign of life, like that truck—and it is not easy, not even when the life is right before one's eyes. Someone lies half hidden in a pile of leaves, like Cindy Sherman in one of her ghoulish self-portraits. The subject's legs are set in one direction and his torso, when it finally emerges, in another as if it belonged to another body entirely. A boy in the passenger seat almost obliterates the man behind the wheel. None of them look all that confident or composed, not even a man holding a boy to his chest. Women, with raised hands and restless eyes, look more imposing but only slightly more at ease.
Steinmetz brings them all close and lets them have their say, but at a distance that the camera can never fully overcome. He travels from state to state like Frank before him or Lee Friedlander touring "America by Car," but he does not set his subjects within the bustle of life. These are portraits and American landscapes, but neither idealized nor staged. Often, the gallery explains, he asks a stranger to repeat a gesture from a moment before. It is his way of treating them as neither models as for Irving Penn, nor types as for August Sander, nor freaks as for Arbus, but themselves. And still, the distance remains.
Much of the barrier lies in the light, which never just illuminates like a lamp. With the girls on their back, it lends their skin the pallor of a mask. It makes the ripples in a creek as hard as glass—and the struggles of a man wading even harder. It bathes each gas pump in a spherical glow. A black balloon at dusk rises above the neon advertising mobile homes. An airplane appears to fly right into a streetlight that has distended way beyond its proper size, but no doubt the bulb just happens to coincide with the moon.
Steinmetz relishes the contrast between his foreground clarity and the background, always in black and white, but one can never say for sure where one ends and the other begins. It takes a moment to realize that the ribbon on a dark panel belongs to the inside of a door—and the blur of a diner to the other side of the glass. Maybe he never has to look for beginnings and endings, because things just go on as they were. The photos belong for the most part to the mid-1990s, but nothing much seems to have changed since then. A girl still carries a cheap Kodak, as if to declare her independence of the photographer, and a weed appears trapped in a crack in the roadbed that may never get repaired. For all the felt isolation, these lightning strikes add up to a way of life.
From Surrealism to body art
Art can take you anywhere. Like Frank in The Americans, it can take you to a political convention or a casino, a street-corner prophet or the open road. Like Ana Mendieta in video and performance, it can take you to a woman's body covered in blood, sweat, and tears. But can a photographer take you to all of these? Frank avowed the influence of Bill Brandt and André Kertész. Mendieta, to my knowledge, never mentioned them. They have a connection, though, in Hans Breder.
Brandt and Kertész brought their deep shadows and violent camera angles to European cities, starting in the 1930s. Frank in 1958 documents the everyday madness of American communities. Yet Brandt also has his "Perspective of Nudes" and Kertész his "Distortion," reducing naked bodies to abstraction or a dream. They parallel Hans Bellmer and, later, Morton Bartlett, who treated dolls and human bodies with equal abandon. One could just as well add Penn and his dance company. Now a gallery points to Brandt, Kertész, and Bellmer as background to Breder's "Body/Sculptures."
Breder's subjects are as provocative as porn and as fluid as a dance, like a woman's body for Barbara Probst or Penn. He multiplies legs, breasts, and rear ends, much as Bellmer brings bodies together while hiding their heads. He does so, though, with a smaller cast—and a mirror. If people appear to have more legs than they should, often they do. A single woman lies on her back with one breast upward and another floating above, her head behind the mirror. Another dances while unmoving, in partner with a chair.
Does he approach Mendieta as well? They were a couple for ten years. He even shares her association between the female body and nature. His photos of women on a beach capture the texture of sand and surf, like an extension of body hair. A different kind of feminist could dismiss it all as the objectification of the female body, under the male gaze. One could say the same about Mendieta, and both artists must have liked it that way.
Breder had other interests as well. The nudes may have carried him from Surrealism to the 1970s, but they took him only four years, beginning in 1969. Born in Germany in 1935, he came to New York in 1964 as an assistant to George Rickey. The latter's kinetic sculpture has a touch of Alexander Calder, Calder mobiles, and Modernism, but also Mark di Suvero and Minimalism. It can evoke wind chimes, stopping just short of sound art. And Breder later directed the Intermedia and Video Art Program at the University of Iowa.
Breder's connection to Minimalism may sound surprising, but then Mendieta eventually married Carl Andre. While an earlier show had explored her collaboration with Breder, another exhibition gives her ten monitors for herself alone, turning flesh into blood and tears into a shower of feathers. Is she asserting a woman's independence or reveling in forces out of her control? A strict division between photography's documentary and darker impulses may not hold up anyway—not when Frank also photographed a doll wrapped in plastic. Still, it is a long way from Surrealism to body art. Credit Breder with bridging the gap.
A riot going on
Of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson coined "the decisive moment" to describe a vision of the present that not all photographers share. Fashion photography or product photography needs time to create an image and to land a sale. Abstract photography asks to step out of time, even when it provides a window onto the photographer at work. From ICP's founding, though, fifty years ago, it made photojournalism not a choice but a responsibility. 
It was not just keeping up with the news but making news. Lives were at stake.
Street photography can seem a casualty—or a foster child of silence and very fast time. You know what to expect at ICP, a city in motion. Look back to New York in the 1970s with Martha Cooper, when crime was at its peak, for empty lots and kids climbing the fences, if not the walls. Just crossing Canal Street with so many others is enough for Corky Lee. Skip ahead to the present, and collective motion means protest—for Freddie Gray in Baltimore with Devin Allen or for Women's Day in Mexico City with Yolanda Andrade. Rest assured that the riot squad will turn up in force, even when no riot is going on.
Look for symbols, like the American flag put to personal use. Look for protest signs and graffiti, like spray paint that rechristens the American West for Nicholas Galanin as No Name Creek and Indian Land. Look for Palestinians on a day at the beach, Ferris wheels, kids doing cartwheels, or everyone just hanging out. Look for displays of street fashion, one girl or woman at a time. Look for them all again and again. The thirty-odd photographers get several shots apiece to do them justice. Most are contemporary and barely known.
The trouble is that you very much can expect them, over and over. Nothing seems all that decisive. As one protest sign has it, for Vanessa Charlot, the people demand "full humanity." Actual humans, though, can get forgotten along the way, as older street photographers like Ming Smith and William Klein would never have allowed. The photographs do not want to make isolated, iconic images, which is exhilarating. Something, though, is lost—be it the issues at stake in protest, the poignancy of outcomes, or photography's experiments.
There are things worth remembering nonetheless, on top of the sheer weight of the familiar. Street lives matter. While many stick to black and white, a tribute to street photography's past, color can tell a story, too. It can erupt in umbrellas for Janette Beckman or women together, in South Africa for Trevor Stuurman or and in China for Feg Li. They are not just showing off but being themselves. Smugglers cycle or cart their bright bundles for Romuald Hazoumè, and yellow caps make police no less dangerous for Lam Yik Fei.
Is a riot going on after all—a riot of color in the riot of the streets? Chastening to a critic, even the breaks in uniformity come more than once. I had admired Anthony Hernandez before for LA seen through a chain-link fence, but here the distancing comes again with Michael Wolf. Long exposures from Alexey Titarenko turn St. Petersburg into a city of ghosts. And then women in white at church in Nigeria for Stephen Tayo could be an extraterrestrial delegation for peace. This, too, is the street.
Mark Steinmetz ran at Yancey Richardson through May 13, 2017. Hans Breder ran at Danziger through April 2, 2016, and Ana Mendieta at Galerie Lelong through March 19. "We Are Here" ran at the International Center of Photography through January 6, 2024. A related review looks again at Ana Mendieta.