Crocker photography exhibit shows the seamy and sweet side of city streets

“The Roaming Eye: International Street Photography from the Ramer Collection” gives viewers a chance to adopt the guise of a flaneur wandering the streets of Paris, New York, Mexico City, Glasgow, Beijing, and Los Angeles. They range from Thomas Annan’s rich 1868 photogravure of a seedy Scottish alleyway with laundry hanging overhead to Liu Zheng’s piquant gelatin silver print of coquettish nightclub dancers in Beijing, printed in 2006.

Soon after the invention of the earliest cameras, street photography became a recognized genre for early masters like Annan and Eugene Atget, whose delightful image of a turn-of-the-19th century organ grinder is included in the show. With the ascendance of portable 35mm cameras like Henri Cartier-Bresson used in 1934 to photograph Mexican prostitutes looking out of windows cut in enclosures suggestive of cages and today’s omnipresent smartphones, the genre has expanded to encompass a fascinating range of public spaces from beaches and parks to pop concerts and public transportation.

Drawn from a local collection, the Crocker show features 70 photographs by 40 distinguished photographers taken in Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas between the mid-19th and early 21st centuries. Arranged roughly chronologically, they cover a wide range of subjects from Lewis Hines’ 1908 image of a child farm laborer picking cotton to Lise Sarfati’s 2010 acidic color image of a hard-edged street waif with a cigarette, standing in the doorway of a smoke shop on a shabby Hollywood corner.

The street takes precedence though in British photographer John Bulmer’s “Black Country 011, Divided Street, 1961,” an unsettling image of a man at a fork in the road of a gritty street in an industrial city in England’s West Midlands region. In Helen Levitt’s “New York, 1938,” the street becomes a kid’s playground as a fire hydrant sprays them with cool water on a hot day at a time when there was no air conditioning.

Though the bulk of the show consists of black-and-white photographs, there are also works in color. In addition to Sarfati’s cinematic C-print “Elisabeth, Sunset Boulevard and North Poinsettia” described above, the show includes Joel Meyerowitz’s magical “Red Interior, Provincetown,” 1971/1980; Simon Roberts’s surprisingly tender 2005 shot of a red-headed woman butcher standing in front of her meaty, raw cuts in a Russian market; and Michael Wolf’s “Architecture of Density #39,” 2003-2014, which appears to be a striped color abstraction at first but actually is an image of a gigantic skyscraper apartment house in Hong Kong whose myriad tiny windows signal how many close-quartered units it holds.

Several photographs document historic events, among them African-American photographer James Van der Zee’s portrait of a group of black Jews in Harlem in the 1930s; George Rodger’s poignant photo of a woman and child evacuating London in 1940 during World War II; and Peter Stackpole’s shot of relaxing workers high up on the Bay Bridge in 1935.

While many of the works in the show depict disturbing events – such as Daido Moriyama’s “Kuriudo (Hunter),” an off-center image of a young girl running through garbage in a steep, narrow alleyway, and W.Eugene Smith’s “Tomoko Uemura in her Bath,” 1971, a silvery image of a girl suffering from mercury poisoning being bathed – others are humorous.

Among those, that made me laugh are Ira Nowinsky’s droll image of a proper young British gentleman in a black tie, wearing a monocle, biting into a huge strawberry at an opera festival in a small English country town; a night photo of a preposterously small and tacky White Castle hamburger stand on a New Jersey highway by George Tice; David Hurn’s picture of an audience of transfixed and teary teenage girls at an English Pop concert in 1963 (I’m betting it was the Beatles onstage); and Leon Levinstein’s candid cropped photos of bathers on the beach at Coney Island.

This is just a terrific show of a stellar collection assembled by a Davis couple right here in our own backyard. You won’t want to miss it.

If you go

The Roaming Eye: International Street Photography from the Ramer Collection

Where: Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street.

When: Through May 12. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. $6 to $12; children 5 and younger and Crocker Museum members are free. Every Third Sunday of the month is “Pay What You Wish Sunday.”

Info: (916) 808-7000, www.crockerart.org