The Decisive Frame
A History of Photography in Twelve Images
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- Photography
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Each chapter explores a pivotal moment in photographic history, beginning with Cartier-Bresson's street photography techniques and moving through candid documentation methods. The work covers fine-art approaches, architectural influences from Jay Hambidge, and the career of Jonathan Green as a photographer. Each section analyzes how specific images changed the medium's direction.
Photography enthusiasts, students of visual culture, and anyone curious about how a single photograph can transform an entire field will find this collection both accessible and revealing.
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Overview
In 1932, Henri Cartier-Bresson took a black and white photograph behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The image, known as Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, shows a moment he captured with his signature style, aiming to freeze what he called the decisive moment. It’s one of his most recognized works, widely praised by critics, and considered so influential that Time magazine named it among the 100 most impactful photographs of all time. The print donated to the Museum of Modern Art measures 35.2 by 24.1 centimeters.
History and description
In 1933, Cartier-Bresson captured a spontaneous moment near Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare, using his Leica camera from a vantage point between wooden planks. The photograph shows a man mid-leap above a shallow pool, barely touching the water, with his reflection visible below near a submerged ladder. Posters advertising pianist Alexander Brailowsky and dancers appear behind him, though he claimed to have noticed them only after taking the shot. He cropped the image himself, explaining that the gap between the fence slats wasn’t wide enough for his lens, which is why the left side appears cut off. The uncropped version included a dark, blurred shadow and an uninteresting section below the pool—both removed in the final frame. It was first exhibited at the Julien Levy gallery in New York under the title "homme sautant place de l'Europe".
Public collections
This photograph exists in multiple public collections, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, both in Paris, as well as the Centre Pompidou. In New York, it can be found at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography. Other locations include the Minneapolis Institute of Art, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Overview
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French humanist photographer and artist, born on 22 August 1908, who became known as a master of candid photography. He was an early adopter of 35mm film and helped pioneer street photography. He believed the essence of great pictures lay in capturing what he called the decisive moment. In 1947, he was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos. Later, in the 1970s, he largely stopped taking photographs and turned to painting instead. He died on 3 August 2004.
Early life
Henri Cartier-Bresson grew up in a wealthy bourgeois family in France, born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, where his father made thread and his mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy. The family lived on Rue de Lisbonne in Paris, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. Though his father expected him to join the family business, Henri was determined not to, and instead pursued photography and sketching. He started with a Box Brownie, later experimenting with a 3×4 inch view camera. At École Fénelon, a Catholic school preparing students for Lycée Condorcet, he was taught by a governess named "Miss Kitty" who came from across the Channel and instilled in him a love of English. A proctor once caught him reading Rimbaud or Mallarmé and scolded him, "Let's have no disorder in your studies!" But then added, "You're going to read in my office," which Henri took as a rare privilege rather than punishment.
Painting
Henri Cartier-Bresson began studying painting at just five years old, working in his uncle Louis’ studio. Louis, a painter and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1910, taught him until his death in World War I. In 1927, Cartier-Bresson attended the Lhote Academy, where Cubist artist André Lhote aimed to blend classical tradition with modern art. There he studied alongside William Klein and Frédéric Menguy. Lhote encouraged his pupils to explore both the Louvre and Paris galleries. Cartier-Bresson also trained with portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. During this time, he immersed himself in the writings of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, and others, while admiring Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck and Piero della Francesca. Lhote came to be known as his teacher of “photography without a camera.”
Surrealists photography influence
Henri Cartier-Bresson found himself drawn to the Surrealist movement after meeting its leading figures at the Café Cyrano in Place Blanche. The group, founded in 1924, approached photography like writers Aragon and Breton approached the street—with a hunger for both the ordinary and the unexpected. They saw in plain photographic fact an essential quality that earlier theories had ignored. According to historian Peter Galassi, the Surrealists recognized that photographs, especially when removed from their practical use, carried unplanned and unpredictable meanings. Though Cartier-Bresson was inspired by these ideas, he struggled to express them in his early work, eventually destroying most of his paintings.
Cambridge and army
In 1928, Henri Cartier-Bresson began studying at the University of Cambridge, where he immersed himself in art, literature, and English, becoming bilingual during his time there. By 1930, he had been called up into the French Army and sent to Le Bourget, near Paris. He later reflected on that period, saying: “And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder.”
Receives first camera
In 1929, Henri Cartier-Bresson was placed under house arrest by his air squadron commandant for hunting without a license. While confined, he met Harry Crosby, an American expatriate, at Le Bourget. Crosby convinced the commandant to release him into his care for a few days. The two shared an interest in photography, and Crosby gave Cartier-Bresson his first camera. They spent time together at Crosby’s home, Le Moulin du Soleil, near Paris in Ermenonville, taking and printing photographs. Crosby later said Cartier-Bresson “looked like a fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey.” During this time, Cartier-Bresson became involved in an intense sexual relationship with Crosby’s wife Caresse, which lasted until 1931.
Escape to Africa
After Harry Crosby’s suicide, Cartier-Bresson’s relationship with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, leaving him deeply heartbroken. During his time in the military, he read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which inspired him to flee to French colonial Africa, specifically the Côte d’Ivoire. There, he survived by hunting and selling game to local villagers. He learned techniques from hunting that later influenced his photography. While in the tropics, he contracted blackwater fever, nearly killing him. Even while ill, he instructed his grandfather on how he wanted to be buried—back in Normandy, at the edge of the Eawy Forest, with Debussy’s String Quartet played. Though he brought a small camera with him, only seven photographs survived the harsh conditions.
Photography
Returning to France after illness, Henri Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille and immersed himself in the Surrealist circle. There, he found inspiration in a 1930 photograph by Martin Munkacsi titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, which captured the joy and movement of three young African boys running into the surf. That image led him to abandon painting and take photography seriously. He acquired a Leica camera with a 50 mm lens, painting its shiny parts black to remain unseen. The small camera allowed him to capture life in motion, and he began photographing across Europe—Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Madrid. His work was first shown in New York at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1933, then in Madrid. In 1934, while in Mexico, he shared an exhibition with Manuel Álvarez Bravo. He did not photograph much in France until years later. That same year, he met David Szymin, known as "Chim," who introduced him to Endré Friedmann, later known as Robert Capa.
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Overview
Candid photography, sometimes called spontaneous or snap shooting, captures moments without people posing or knowing they’re being photographed. It focuses on natural expressions and unguarded actions, showing life as it happens rather than in a studio or controlled setting. This style is used in street photography, weddings, portraits, events, and even photojournalism. Photographers might use distance or long lenses to avoid alerting their subjects. The key is that the subject isn’t posed—though whether they know they’re being filmed doesn’t determine if it’s candid. If the intent is total secrecy, that becomes secret photography, an extreme form of candid work.
As an art form
Dr. Erich Salomon is widely recognized as the first photographer to use available light for candid shots, capturing social elites in Berlin and politicians during the late 1920s and early 1930s with a glass plate camera called the Ermanox, fitted with an f/1.8 lens. The Ermanox was made by the Ernemann-Werke of Dresden and introduced in 1924. French Minister Aristide Briand once said, “There are just three things necessary for a League of Nations conference: a few Foreign Secretaries, a table and Salomon.” An English editor called his work “candid photographs,” an art of observation that stuck with the public. The Leica camera, designed by Oscar Barnack and introduced by Ernst Leitz in 1924, became known as the “candid camera.” Henri Cartier-Bresson and Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, were among those who elevated candid photography into an art form. Successful candid photographers learn to make people feel at ease, blending in so that subjects react naturally. This skill was key for celebrity photographers like René Burri and Raeburn Flerlage. Some argue candid photography is the purest form of photojournalism, though it often captures life as it happens rather than telling a story through images.
Camera equipment
For candid photography, the camera must be unobtrusive, often small, to keep from disturbing the people being photographed. Since flash can startle subjects and make them pose rather than act naturally, photographers relied on available light. Early candid shots were taken outdoors, using sunlight. When indoors, they needed films with higher speeds—ISO—and techniques like “push processing” to capture images without flash. This led to the grainy, high-contrast look common in early candid work. Digital cameras changed that, making it easier to shoot in low light without flash. Full-frame DSLRs and mirrorless models now produce clean, saturated images even at high ISO settings, reducing the noise that once limited sensitivity.
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Overview
Photography as fine art emerges when the photographer's personal vision drives the work, using the medium to express ideas, messages, or emotions. This differs from photojournalism, which documents specific events and subjects in a way that represents objective reality, not the artist’s viewpoint. It also contrasts with commercial photography, whose main purpose is to promote products or services. In each case, the intent shapes how the image functions and what it communicates to the viewer.
Invention through 1940s
In 1851, John Edwin Mayall exhibited daguerreotypes illustrating the Lord's Prayer, regarded as among the earliest fine-art photographs. During the Victorian era, practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander contributed to establishing photography as an art form. In the U.S., F. Holland Day, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen were instrumental, with Stieglitz especially noted for bringing photography into museum collections. As recently as 1960, in Britain photography was not generally recognized as fine-art; S. D. Jouhar said it was seen more as a craft, though some galleries displayed pictorial photography. By the late 1970s, genres like nudes and landscapes were common, with artists such as Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman reimagining them. Josef H. Neumann developed chemograms in the mid-1970s — a process blending photography and painting on paper, considered an early form of analog post-production. The Aperture Foundation and MoMA supported photography's rise, with MoMA appointing Beaumont Newhall as its first photography curator in 1940.
1950s to present day
Since around 1980, improved printing technologies have made art prints in limited-edition books highly collectible. These books, with their high production values and short runs, are rarely reprinted, making them attractive to collectors. In 2004, 7,000 photographs were sold at auction, with prices rising 7.6 percent annually between 1994 and 2004, mostly in the United States. While online retailers have had mixed success selling fine photography, strong sales come mainly from established names like Ansel Adams. Photographers such as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall are known for carefully staged images, while digital trends now allow full-spectrum photography using ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. Some artists, like Gerhard Richter, blend photography with painting, blurring the line between the two mediums.
Genres and approaches
Fine-art photography draws on traditional genres like landscape, portraiture, the nude, and still life, all of which come from painting. Some of these have commercial or practical versions that help define what fine art is, though many works cross those lines. For example, the structured grids of Bernd and Hilla Becher are seen as both urban landscape and conceptual photography, showing how categories can overlap. The boundaries between them aren’t strict, and individual pieces often live in more than one space.
Natural landscape
Fine-art landscape photography in America has its roots in the work of government surveyors during the nineteenth century. One key figure was Timothy H. O'Sullivan, whose large-format photographs from the Government Surveys between 1867 and 1879 were later recognized as art. In the twentieth century, this tradition gained broader acceptance through Group f/64, which formed in 1932, and through the iconic images of Ansel Adams, especially his photographs of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, which came to define what American fine-art landscape photography meant.
Urban landscape
Since the late nineteenth century, fine-art photographers have engaged the built environment, and Eugène Atget’s careful documentation of Paris from the 1890s to 1927 was later embraced as art by the surrealists and by Berenice Abbott. Her own project, Changing New York, from 1935 to 1939, followed Atget’s example. Then, from 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher introduced their methodical typological grids, which became central to conceptual art. Their teaching shaped the Düsseldorf School, including artists like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff. In 1975, the exhibition New Topographics at the George Eastman House brought human-altered landscapes into the fine-art museum as a critical aesthetic stance.
Portrait
Since its birth, photography has drawn artists to the portrait form, where the focus lies not on recording a face but on evoking emotion, idea, and beauty. Julia Margaret Cameron believed her work should “ennoble photography and secure it for the character and uses of high art,” a goal echoed by her peer Félix Nadar. The German photographer August Sander made his Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts a cornerstone of New Objectivity, while Richard Avedon’s stark black-and-white portraits, often shot against plain white backgrounds, were the subject of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002.
Nude
From photography’s earliest days, the nude appeared in fine-art work, drawing on centuries of artistic tradition in painting and sculpture. Photographers used the human body not only to document but to explore ideas of form and meaning. By the early 1900s, this approach was central to pictorialist practice, with F. Holland Day among those leading the way. Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham of Group f/64 brought a modernist vision to the subject. Later artists like Bill Brandt, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, and John Coplans expanded on this legacy, each contributing their own distinct voice to the genre.
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Overview
Street photography captures moments in public spaces, often unplanned, through careful framing and timing. It’s about finding art or meaning in everyday life, whether that involves people or not. While it's closely linked to candid photography, street work can happen anywhere—urban or not—and doesn’t always require human subjects. The style flourished from the end of the 19th century through the late 1970s, when portable cameras made it easier to photograph in public without drawing attention. Like photojournalists and social documentary photographers, street photographers often document behavior and events, navigating ethical questions around privacy and property. Much of what we now consider classic street photography was created during this era.
History
Photographs of ordinary life in public spaces have been part of art since prehistoric times, appearing in Sumerian, Egyptian, and early Buddhist works. In the West, this theme showed up in Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. Because street scenes were already a well-established subject in other art forms, it was only natural that photographers would take up the same theme once the technology allowed them to.
Nineteenth-century precursors
In 1838 or 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre took the first photograph of people on the street, capturing a scene from his studio window on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. One image, taken at about 8:00 am, shows an empty street except for a man having his boots brushed—his feet are visible because he was still, but his body and head are missing, blurred by motion. Charles Nègre later achieved the technical skill to photograph people in movement on Paris's streets in 1851. John Thomson, working with journalist Adolphe Smith, published Street Life in London in twelve monthly installments beginning in February 1877, helping to establish street life as a serious photographic subject. Eugene Atget, though not the first, became widely known in the late 1920s through Berenice Abbott's promotion of his work documenting Parisian streets. Though he mainly photographed architecture and urban details from the 1890s to the 1920s, Atget also captured some workers. The Leica camera, first sold in 1925, made it easier for photographers to move through busy streets and capture fleeting moments.
United Kingdom
Paul Martin captured unposed moments of life in London and at the seaside during the late 19th and early 20th century, pioneering candid street photography with a concealed camera. In 1937, the social research group Mass-Observation was formed to document everyday life in Britain, especially people’s reactions to King Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 and his marriage to Wallis Simpson. Humphrey Spender took photographs in the northern industrial town of Bolton, referred to in the project’s reports as “Yorktown,” while filmmaker Humphrey Jennings recorded events in London. The main researchers were anthropologist Tom Harrisson in Bolton and poet Charles Madge in London. Their first findings were published in a report titled May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by more than two hundred contributors.
France
After World War Two, French photographers in the Humanist School captured everyday life on Paris streets and in bistros using small cameras and available light, discovering what writer Pierre Mac Orlan called the "fantastique social de la rue" — the social fantastic of the street. Their work shown annually by Le Groupe des XV from 1946 to 1957 was exhibited in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Edward Steichen. In 1951 to 1952, Steichen showed Five French Photographers including Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Ronis, and Izis. A 1953 show titled Post-war European Photography further spread this style internationally. Steichen also curated The Family of Man in 1955, a global exhibition that inspired photographers to document ordinary life. Henri Cartier-Bresson's Images à la Sauvette, published in English as The Decisive Moment in 1952, promoted capturing the "decisive moment" when form and content merge into a transcendent whole.
America
Walker Evans photographed people in the New York City Subway from 1938 to 1941 using a hidden 35 mm Contax camera, aiming for an impersonal record method, but his work wasn't published until 1966 in Many Are Called, with an introduction by James Agee. Around the same time, Helen Levitt, a teacher of children and associate of Evans, documented the chalk drawings and the kids who made them. Her images were shown at MoMA in 1939 and again in a solo exhibition there in 1943. The photographs were later collected into a book titled In The Street. Street photography in America grew alongside jazz, reflecting everyday life. Robert Frank's The Americans, published in 1958, challenged the formal rules of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. "I wanted to follow my own intuition and do it my way, and not make any concession – not make a Life story," he said. His work transformed photography's possibilities, and John Szarkowski later promoted street photography, curating shows at MoMA that included Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand.
Individual approaches in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
In the 1960s, inspired by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Joel Meyerowitz began capturing life on the streets of New York. As critic Sean O'Hagan wrote in 2014, “In the 1960s and 70s, he defined street photography as an attitude as well as a style – and it has laboured in his shadow ever since, so definitive are his photographs of New York.” Later that decade, Tony Ray-Jones returned to the UK from the US, where he had met Winogrand and embraced street photography. He looked at British people on holiday or at festivals with a wry eye, creating high-contrast monochromes full of comic irony. His work was popularized by Creative Camera, for which he interviewed Brassaï. More recently, Martin Parr has taken up that comic vein in hyper-saturated color.
Characteristics and Distinctions
Street photography is a broad style of image-making, defined in various ways, but often marked by the unplanned capture of a moment that can never happen again, usually showing ordinary life through the eyes of strangers. It's typically made with wider-angle lenses, like a 35mm, and most often set in cityscapes.
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Early life and theory
Jay Hambidge studied art in New York under William Merritt Chase and at the Art Students' League, grounding himself deeply in classical traditions. He believed that arithmetic, when paired with geometric designs, revealed the principles of proportion and symmetry found in Greek art—architecture, sculpture, and ceramics alike. After measuring classical buildings like the Parthenon and temples at Bassæ and Olympia, he developed his theory of "dynamic symmetry," which he explored in Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase (1920) and The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (1926). His ideas sparked debate, with critics including Edwin M. Blake and Rhys Carpenter challenging his methods in 1921. Art historian Michael Quick said their critiques showed how Hambidge's system could describe any shape when used in complex ways. By 1979, Lee Malone noted that while Hambidge's theories were discredited, they had appealed to many American artists of the early 20th century because they offered what those artists wanted to hear. He married the weaver Mary Crovatt.
Dynamic symmetry
Dynamic symmetry, a method of proportioning described in Jay Hambidge’s writings, relies on specific rectangular forms based on mathematical ratios like √2, √3, √5, the silver ratio δs = 2.414..., and others. Hambidge observed that a modified Fibonacci sequence beginning with 118 and 191 offers a more accurate model for natural design systems, where each number divided by the next approximates 1.6180, the golden ratio. This system influenced artists such as George Bellows, who lived from 1882 to 1925, Maxfield Parrish, Helen Hokinson, Al Nestler, Kathleen Munn, Robert McCloskey, and Clay Wagstaff. Elizabeth Whiteley also applied dynamic symmetry in her drawings on paper.
Photography
In digital photography, applying Dynamic Symmetry brings a deeper creativity than the Rule of Thirds, which most photographers rely on. Bob Holmes from National Geographic said a photographer must "be responsible for everything in the frame." Using diagonals and their reciprocal lines related to the frame’s size, one can craft intricate images. Annie Leibovitz used this method in a Vanity Fair portrait, aligning subjects with diagonals to guide the viewer. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French painter turned film photographer, also used Dynamic Symmetry to capture what he called "The Decisive Moment"—when visual and psychological elements come together perfectly in a real-life scene.
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Overview
Jonathan Green, born in 1939, is a writer, historian, curator, and photographer who helped shape how we understand American photography. He wrote key books like Camera Work: A Critical Anthology and American Photography: A Critical History 1945–1980. As founding director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, he brought fresh perspectives to art and architecture, supporting artists like Adrian Piper and Furtura 2000. His exhibitions explored topics such as Rape, AIDS, and feminist art, and featured work by Arnie Zane, Nancy Rexroth, Leslie Payne, and Pedro Meyer. Green’s unconventional choices helped influence the selection of architect Peter Eisenman, known mainly as a theorist at that time. He held teaching roles at MIT, Ohio State University, and UC Riverside.
Early life
Jonathan Green was born in Troy, New York, to Jewish parents. His father, Rabbi Alan S. Green, was a prominent reform rabbi who contributed to the reform movement's liturgy and wrote books such as Sex, God, and the Sabbath and The Mystery of Jewish Marriage. His mother, Frances, worked as a social worker in Palestine during the mid-1930s, where she collaborated with Henrietta Szold on Youth Aliya.
Education and university affiliation
Jonathan Green grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and went to local public schools. He studied at MIT from 1958 to 1960, then spent a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He earned his BA from Brandeis University in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and English Literature, summa cum laude, in 1963. He later received a master's degree from Harvard as a Danforth Fellow in 1967. From 1968 to 1976, he taught with Minor White at MIT, eventually becoming acting director of the MIT Creative Photography Laboratory and Gallery after White retired. In 1976, he joined Ohio State University as Professor of Photography and Cinema and founded the Wexner Center for the Arts. Later, from 1990 to 2015, he taught at the University of California, Riverside, where he was Professor of the History of Art and Photography, director of the California Museum of Photography, and executive director of UCR ARTSblock.
Early writings
As a freshman at MIT in May 1960, Jonathan Green earned third place in a university-wide essay contest for an analysis of three poems by Dylan Thomas. By Spring 1964, his translation of Fahrenheim by Shmuel Yosef Agnon had been published in Mosaic, the Harvard-Radcliffe literary magazine. Later that year, after attending a workshop with Minor White, Green started writing for Aperture Quarterly. There, he contributed commentaries on Edward Weston’s Daybooks, Harry Callahan’s El Mochuelo, and the Museum of Modern Art monograph, as well as Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street.
Boston MBTA Subway Murals 1965
In 1965, Jonathan Green was commissioned by architects Peter Chermayeff and Lou Bakanowsky of Cambridge Seven Associates to document the Boston MBTA stations at Copley, Arlington, and Park. Based on his high-contrast photographs from Israel and Europe, Green joined fellow photographer Len Gittleman to create images that would become large-scale silkscreen and porcelain enamel murals. The work depicted iconic local buildings and landscapes near each station, including the Arlington Street Church and Boston Public Gardens. These black-and-white murals were installed in 1967 and remained on view for over twenty years.
Ezra Stoller 1967–1968
In 1967, Jonathan Green joined Ezra Stoller in Mamaroneck, New York, where he spent time learning the craft of architectural photography. After working with Stoller, Green went on to document buildings in Boston for a number of prominent architects and firms, such as Edward Larrabee Barnes, Richard Meier, and The Architects Collaborative. During the early 1970s, he was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to photograph exhibitions, including shows by Paul Strand, Minor White, and Jerry Uelsmann. His architectural images appeared in numerous publications, including Progressive Architecture, Architectural Record, and A Field Guide to Modern American Architecture, with several of his works gracing the covers of those journals.
Minor White and Aperture
Jonathan Green was introduced to Minor White by a classmate while he was at Harvard. White had recently been invited by MIT to launch a new photography program. Green, who was working for Ezra Stoller in Mamaroneck, began contributing articles to White’s journal, Aperture. In 1968, White discovered that the Creative Photo Laboratory—a part of MIT’s School of Architecture—could hire another instructor, provided that person taught architectural photography. White then invited Green to apply. Green was hired in the fall of 1968 at MIT.
Camera Work
Jonathan Green, working as a managing editor at White and Aperture, was encouraged by Michael Hoffman to expand beyond his short articles and take on a major project. Aperture, which had begun publishing books, suggested that Green prepare a detailed study of Stieglitz's Camera Work, the magazine published from 1903 to 1917. Green spent many hours in the Boston Public Library reviewing original issues and conceived a lavish volume meant to capture the spirit of the original in modern terms. His aim was to show how Camera Work helped shift artistic sensibility from the nineteenth to the present day. He collaborated with designer Stephen Korbet and typographer Herb Lubalin, and the project received support from two foundations. The resulting book, Camera Work: A Critical Anthology, was honored with a top award for art books in 1973. Critics praised its quality, with Hilton Kramer calling it exemplary and Peter Bunnell noting Green's insightful analysis and the book's outstanding design.
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