Commerce Street from Bedford Street, New York,

ca. 1940

Between the many galleries overseen by Alfred Stieglitz from 1905 to 1946 and the Clarence H. White School, opened in 1914 as the first institution dedicated to teaching photography as an art in the United States, New York City was increasingly established as a center for modern art. In decades marked by the demolition of hundreds of old buildings to make way for dozens of new skyscrapers and a five-fold increase in population, the city held particular appeal to artists as a subject. While city streets have appeared in photographs since the inception of the medium in the early 1800s, it was not until the widespread practice of making photographs in city streets in the early 1900s that a new genre known as “street photography” emerged—and New York was its capital. These photographs might treat the location aesthetically or they might capture a scene of human interest, they might be taken by Kodak camera hobbyists, students at the White School, or even professional street photographers, but they always relied on a city perpetually in flux.