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Tonight, after dinner, I stopped by the opening for Alex Webb’s “Istanbul” at the Sepia Gallery on 24th street. It was packed. Webb is a great photographer–he’s a member of Magnum, after all–but as I looked around, my longstanding doubts about street photography resurfaced. In particular, it seems that many of the great modern-day street photographers rely on a very predictable type of visual balance to achieve striking pictures: the partitioning of major compositional elements (especially people) into different focal planes, with one always in the immediate foreground. Let me demonstrate what I mean, with a few sample Webb images (all copyright Magnum photos).

Red=foreground element Blue=middleground element Green=background element

Every time this compositional setup is used, it’s appealing. (In fact, it’s the sort of thing that would be a really useful lesson in Intro to Photo workshops.) The problem is that, in a show as large as this one, it begins to feel like a gimmick–the same way you’d feel if you went to an opening and discovered that 70% of the images were arranged according to the rule of thirds. Each time I stumbled upon an image that didn’t employ the multiple-focal-planes composition, it felt refreshing. And too infrequent.

Also, this repetitive composition leads you to wonder what all these photographs have to do with Istanbul. A title like “Istanbul” implies some attempt, however incomplete, to visually represent the city. In this exhibition, however, Istanbul seemed little more than grist for the Webb-mill, raw material for the photographer to churn into aesthetically pleasing compositions. Only a few images carried any real information. One fantastic shot that comes to mind was a woman in a burka in front of an enormous billboard for fluorescent, girly flip-flops, a particularly adept visual rendering of the clash of cultures in the (arguably) most Westernized nation in the Arab world. Another image, of a man smoothing a dove’s wing in his mouth, provoked a kind of curiosity–a desire to know more about this ancient capital–that was sadly lacking from the rest of these technically accomplished photographs. Webb is a master of the single frame, but taken together as a body of work, “Istanbul” seems to fall short of telling us anything meaningful about the city.