New York: Capital of Photography
As Walker Evans aged, he arrived in New York City to demonstrate  some of photography's best tricks, epitomized by his candid  portraits of subway riders shot through peepholes cut in  newspapers he pretended to read. Evans is one of dozens of  photographers in this well-designed and often surprising book,  which accompanies an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York  and reveals a city full of visual excitement. The former  executive editor of Artforum, Kozloff curated the show and  compiled this volume of black-and-white (and some color)  photographs, mostly by Jewish artists, spanning from 1898 to  2001. In technique and composition, these pictures fail to fit  any studious or professional parameters. Instead, they represent  a rough, immediate, and nearly accidental moment on film, the  work of an exceptionally savvy and improvisational band of  photographers. Weegee, Diane Arbus, Ben Shahn, Alfred Stieglitz,  and others represented here have understood and pointed a camera  at scenes that capture the heart of a great metropolis its  random and endless gatherings of people, who are all New  Yorkers. Recommended. David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CTCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.