There’s something endlessly compelling about watching life unfold on the street. The chance encounters, passing expressions and unscripted moments that would otherwise go unnoticed have long drawn photographers to urban environments.
In the late 1830s, Louis Daguerre took what is believed to be the first ever photograph of a person on the streets of Paris. The figure is only visible because he remained still, long enough for the slow exposure to register his presence.
It wasn’t until the 20th Century however, that street photography would find its footing, pioneered by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson who approached the street in very different ways. Some focused on timing and composition, others on atmosphere, politics or everyday detail, but all brought a sharper sense of immediacy to the medium. The result is a rich and varied body of work that continues to influence how we see and document public life. This selection brings together some of the key photographers who defined that shift.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)
Henri Cartier-Bresson is widely regarded as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. Trained as a painter and shaped by Surrealism, he developed an approach grounded in instinct, composition and timing, capturing fleeting moments with a clarity that felt both immediate and precise. As a co-founder of Magnum Photos, he travelled extensively across Europe, Asia and the Americas, documenting life at every scale. His idea of the “decisive moment” became central to how photography was understood, a concept explored in accessible introductions such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (Photofile) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (New Horizons).
Across a career spanning more than sixty years, Cartier-Bresson photographed war, political change and daily life, always with a strong focus on the individual. From the Spanish Civil War to revolutionary China and postwar Europe, his work moves between history and observation while remaining closely attuned to human experience. This breadth, alongside his portraits of key cultural figures, is explored in greater depth in Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography. Together, his work established a way of seeing that continues to shape street photography today.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006)
Gordon Parks was a pioneering figure in 20th-century photography. As well as being the first African American photographer to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and to become a staff photographer for Life magazine, he was also a writer, film director and composer.
Although best known for documenting issues such as poverty, race relations and civil rights, Gordon Parks was remarkably versatile, turning his gift for visual narrative to subjects as diverse as news coverage, fashion, art and sport. He also captured prominent figures of his era, from Malcolm X to Marilyn Monroe, in a series of memorable portraits. Working in the US and around the world, he was driven by a commitment to social justice:
The common search for a better life and a better world is deeper than colour or blood. – Gordon Parks
Discover Gordon Parks (Photofile)
©The Gordon Parks Foundation. ‘Untitled’, Harlem, New York, 1948
Ruth Orkin (1921–1985)
Ruth Orkin always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and although that ambition was thwarted until later in her career, she quickly found other ways of engaging with the world of images. She was given her first camera at the age of ten and by the age of seventeen, she was cycling across America from Los Angeles to New York, documenting her trip in albums of annotated photographs. In the early 1940s she settled in New York, joining the Photo League and making her name with photo stories for major magazines such as Life, Look and This Week.
Discover Ruth Orkin (Photofile)
© Ruth Orkin Photo Archive ‘American Girl in Italy’, Florence, from the series American Girl in Italy, 1951
Harry Gruyaert (b. 1941)
Award-winning Magnum Photographer Harry Gruyaert was among the first European photographers to fully embrace colour film, developing a style inspired by Pop Art and cinema at a time when black and white still dominated (Harry Gruyaert by François Hébel and Richard Nonas). From early works like TV Shots (1972) onwards, his images prioritise light, colour, texture and composition over story, creating bold, self-contained photographs that feel both graphic and atmospheric.
Gruyaert’s work has taken him to countless places across Europe, North Africa and the United States, but he has consistently returned to a few locations, including his home country of Belgium (as documented in Harry Gruyaert: Homeland), New York (Harry Gruyaert: New York) and Morocco (Hary Gruyaert: Morocco), capturing a splendid harmony between form and colour, people and environments. As reflected in Cédric Klapisch’s introduction to Hary Gruyaert: New York, even the most ordinary scenes in his work are transformed into vivid, cinematic moments through his acute sensitivity to light, atmosphere and the rhythms of everyday life.
When I look at his photos, I immediately see life. I often find myself wondering who these people are that I’m looking at; they turn into characters in a potential movie. – Cédric Klapisch
© Harry Gruyaert, Manhattan, liquor store, 1985
Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938)
It requires a lot of timing and visual skill to manage the amount of information that’s in the frame. – Joel Meyerowitz
An early advocate of colour photography, Joel Meyerowitz has impacted and influenced generations of artists. For over sixty years, the master photographer has documented the US’s ever-changing social landscape.
For a while, during the late 1960s, Meyerowitz carried two cameras: one loaded with monochrome stock, the other with colour. Just how, when and why US fine-art photographers switched from black-and-white image-making, which was prized within the gallery system, to colour photography, once seen as the preserve of the holiday snapper, has been the cause of much debate.
©Joel Meyerowitz, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery
Martin Parr (1952–2025)
Martin Parr was famous for capturing ordinary people, consumer culture, tourism and social habits with bright colours, close-up compositions and ironic humour. His work explored class, leisure, food, consumerism and everyday behaviour in Britain and around the world, his photographs turning commonplace scenes such as beaches, supermarkets and tourist attractions into sharp observations about contemporary society.
Some of his most influential projects include The Last Resort (1986), which documented working-class holidaymakers in seaside towns, and Small World (1995), a humorous look at global tourism. He also published many photobooks and became a member of the photography cooperative Magnum Photos in 1994. Parr is one of the eighty photographers featured in Seaside Photographed, which documents the roaring waves of the 19th century through the heyday of the classic seaside resort in the 1950s and 60s, and the critical reportage of the 1980s and 1990s, to the more intimate recent work.
Discover Seaside Photographed.
Magnum Photos. © Martin Parr. New Brighton, Merseyside, from The Last Resort, 1983–86
Saul Leiter (1923–2013)
Photographs are often treated as capturing important moments, but they are really small fragments and memories of the world that never ends. – Saul Leiter
Saul Leiter was a photographer who sought neither fame nor commercial success, despite his extraordinary talent for image making. Born in Pittsburgh, he spent his entire adult life in New York City’s East Village, where he encountered Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists as well as discovering street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
He photographed and painted nearly every day, amassing an enormous archive of works, some of which were not revealed until after his death (The Unseen Saul Leiter). Like other early adopters of colour film, Saul Leiter's photographs evoke the rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous reality. His images were often unconventional, making use of reflections, transparency, complex framing and mirroring effects to create a unique kind of urban view.
Discover Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, Forever Saul Leiter, Saul Leiter (Photofile) The Unseen Saul Leiter, and All About Saul Leiter.
©Photographs by Saul Leiter /© Saul Leiter Foundation, 2023 Snow, 1970
Vivian Maier (1926-2009)
With the discovery of her archive in a thrift auction house in 2007, Vivian Maier’s posthumous trajectory from relative obscurity to one of the great American photographers of the 20th century is a story of a singular consistent talent. From the mid 1950s throughout her adult life, she worked as a nanny between New York and Chicago, and it was during this time that she created a huge body of photographs and films recording everyday street life, often including her own self-portrait and moments of fleeting reflection within the cityscape. With her work compared to Helen Levitt, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, her photographs are a fascinating window into American life.
Discover Vivian Maier and Vivian Maier (Photofile).
©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY
Robert Frank (1924–2019)
Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank moved to the United States in the late 1940s and became one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He is most famous for capturing everyday life across the United States with a raw, emotional and often critical perspective. Through images of highways, diners and ordinary people, Frank revealed the loneliness and complexity behind the American dream.
Unlike traditional documentary photography of the time, Frank’s work used grainy textures and unusual framing, giving his photographs a personal and cinematic style. His approach strongly influenced later generations of street and documentary photographers. In addition to photography, Robert Frank also created experimental films and visual diaries that explored memory, identity, and social change. His work remains highly respected for its honesty and innovative vision.
©Robert Frank from The Americans, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955, gelatin silver print. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy, in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Photography at the National Gallery of Art
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938)
Daido Moriyama first came to prominence in the mid-1960s. If there is one theme that jumps out from his work – one that can be regarded as his essential territory, the wellspring of his photography – it is Tokyo. He also draws inspiration from William Klein’s confrontational photographs of New York, Shomei Tomatsu’s trenchant social critiques, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima.
As Gabriel Bauret points out in his introduction to Moriyama (Photofile), Light and Shadow is the title of a book published by Moriyama in 1982, but it could just as easily be applied to his whole photographic oeuvre, given the dialogue he so powerfully sets up between light and shadow, black and white.
Discover Thames & Hudson books on Moriyama.
©Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Louis Stettner (1922–2016)
Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner first picked up a camera as a teenager and went on to establish an extraordinary career that lasted almost eighty years. After photographing life on the streets of New York, he joined the famous Photo League and befriended Sid Grossman and Weegee. In the Second World War he served as a combat photographer, and the fight against fascism strengthened his faith in Marxism and the working class.
Living between New York and Paris, he amassed a huge body of work that combined elements of New York street photography with lyrical humanism in the French style. His subjects were many and varied: passengers on the subway and tourists in the streets, Spanish fishermen and American beatniks, protests and demonstrations, landscapes and trees. But no matter where he found himself, he looked for beauty in the everyday and never lost his fundamental compassion and solidarity with ordinary people.
