Ken Van Sickle

Ken Van Sickle: Photography 1954–2009 is a collection of 140 black-and-white photographs taken around the world from 1954 to the present—a selection of personal favorites chosen by the photographer himself. Van Sickle (born 1932) participated in a defining era of midcentury street photography: he assisted Robert Frank, exhibited with Duane Michaels and had his photos included in the very first photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1960. But after that early period of prominence, Van Sickle’s photographic work dropped out of view, remaining little known until recently, when his newly rediscovered images spurred comparisons to Irving Penn’s sense of light and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s compositions.

Nearly 70 years after some of them were taken, Ken Van Sickle: Photography 1954–2009 brings together the photographer’s images in a gorgeous, exhaustive monograph—the photographer’s first.

Van Sickle is best known for his atmospheric images of New York and Paris at midcentury. These photographs fulfill the time-traveling brief of great street photography, granting onlookers intimate, keyhole access to Paris in the ‘50s, the New York Beat scene and Andy Warhol’s Factory, scenes which feel simultaneously familiar and fresh through Van Sickle’s lens.