Workers

It was perhaps André Kertész who first demonstrated the enormous photographic richness of the street. For a generation of photographers since, the street has been the true living theater, where slapstick and tragedy and all manner of sideshows have elbowed each other for performing room, and all of it accessible and free. Had the photographer written the script and directed the action, he could not have done so well.
During these forty years the theater of the street has changed, if we are to believe the evidence of photographs, and the changes in some ways seem to parallel those that have occurred in the formal theater. Plot has become increasingly tenuous, action has become progressively arbitrary (or sometimes invisible), and the players seem less and less often to represent distinguishable characters. Beyond this, both theaters have seemed to concentrate more and more on the odd and unexplained fragments of life, the mystifying pieces that are left over when we had thought the kit was fully assembled.
John Szarkowski

Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art